Marquis de Sade Quotes

I shall be glad when you have strangled the invincible respectability that dogs your steps.

Something I've always written about is social expectations: that the eyes of the community are on you all the time, expecting you to line up with certain social norms, certain behaviours. Whenever you forgot about them, they'd be strongly reiterated to you, in no uncertain terms.

We have been obliged to respond to the compulsions of our society.

Let us then, dear friends, forever bow down to the general reason of society.

Consciously or unconsciously most of us adhere to what is expected of our role because we realize our social success depends on this. Some may refuse to play this game, but in the end they are marginalized and forced to play the outsider role, with limited options and decreasing freedom as they get older.

At every point I am besieged by people who would like me to conform to some social norm of whatever sort of social group they expect me to be a part of. I never have any identification with these social groups.

At this level, the individual perceives the maintenance of the expectations of his family, group, or nation as valuable in its own right, regardless of immediate and obvious consequences.

Quite a few people have to believe something is normal before it becomes normal - a sort of 'voting' situation. But once the threshold is reached, then everyone demands to do whatever it is.

Women are taught that if you want to be a lady, keep your opinions to yourself and be polite.

Civilization is a conspiracy. Modern life is the silent compact of comfortable folk to keep up pretences.

To be a good Briton, a man must trade profitably, marry respectably, live cleanly, avoid excess, revere the established order, and wear his heart in his breeches pocket or anywhere but on his sleeve.

Young people in my generation were sort of in lockstep, and it wasn't just the '40s, either. In the '30s and in the '50s it was the same. No one ever dropped out unless he got sick or got kicked out.

The framework of men's wear is so narrow, that when you play at the edges you get labeled.

On the whole, the experience that the activity of the soul obeys the law of least resistance has been verified even in regard to women's social morals. As a rule, these have been focused on the family and on charity - among other reasons, because woman's sense of duty seldom finds means of expression in other directions.

I think behind closed doors people behave differently no matter what period we're looking at, because people have to stand up straight in public but can slouch behind closed doors - can you imagine wearing those corsets?

Do you know what we are those of us who count as pillars of society? We are society's tools, neither more nor less.

I don't imagine my parents are too excited about my kind of life. The surrounding weirdness bothers them. Still, I think they're pretty good. Their lives are based on what their friends think, just like ours are.

Morality is the custom of one's country and the current feeling of one's peers.

If society fits you comfortably enough, you call it freedom.

Conventionality is not morality.

Most people live their life around what other people do.

We delude ourselves into believing that morality comes from somewhere else, whereas in reality we behave as we've been told to behave.

Society has taught us to suppress certain things and not do certain things.

Peer pressure is just that: pressure.

The whole system of society tells you what to do.