David Harvey Quotes

Everything is arranged so that it be this way, this is what is called culture.

All laws are an attempt to domesticate the natural ferocity of the species.

No matter what town you are in, there is some social order and a different yardstick to chart. In New York, people create things like schools and speaking languages and second homes.

There is a sense that women are more anchored than men in our society.

Institutions are what allow us to have continuity in civilizations.

Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance.

Aristocrats might shrug, but commoners, dreading any collapse of the social order, wanted the rules of behavior to be observed.

A man with a talent does what is expected of him, makes his way, constructs, is an engineer, a composer, a builder of bridges. It's the natural order of things that he construct objects outside himself and his family. The woman who does so is aberrant. We have to expiate for this cursed talent someone handed out to us, by mistake, in the black mystery of genetics.

Society cannot exist without etiquette ... It never has, and until our own century, everybody knew that.

Good manners require space and time.

In most old communities there is a common sense even in sensuality. Vice itself gets gradually digested into a system, is amenable to certain laws of conventional propriety and honor, has for its object simply the gratification of its appetites, and frowns with quite a conservative air on all new inventions, all untried experiments in iniquity.

How powerful social mores are! Only a spider's web lies across the volcano, yet it refrains from erupting.

Society having ordained certain customs, men are bound to obey the law of society, and conform to its harmless orders.

If two people want to get married, get married! The Victorians had a great saying: As long as it doesn't scare the horses, do what you want. And I absolutely believe that.

[O]ne person's 'barbarian' is another person's 'just doing what everybody else is doing.

... it is a great mistake to confuse conventionality with simplicity ... it takes a good deal of intelligence and a great many inhibitions to follow a social code.

Perhaps what you call conventionality, I call decency.

We're the victims of a disease called social prejudice, my child. These dear ladies of the law and order league are scouring out the dregs of the town. C'mon be a glorified wreck like me.

A sane person to an insane society must appear insane.

GENTLE READER: You, sir, are an anarchist, and Miss Manners is frightened to have anything to do with you. It is true that questioning the table manners of others is rude. But to overthrow the accepted conventions of society, on the flimsy grounds that you have found them silly, inefficient and discomforting, is a dangerous step toward destroying civilization.

The most curious social convention of the great age in which we live is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected.

I don't waste time in flowery small talk, as people do in India.

Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once…and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you.

I feel like it's a subversive thing [a certain body type to admire] which keeps women preoccupied with something that doesn't matter, and takes up a lot of space, and prevents people from what they're meant to be doing.

With what hope can we endeavor to persuade the ladies that the time spent at the toilet is lost in vanity.