Herman Wouk Quotes

Any society where it's a crime or a hassle to be different is a society based on psychological fascism.

The free, self-determining, self-developing soul may not walk its own path, however innocently, but must fit into the scheme and pattern …

No member of any society has a right to teach any doctrine contrary to what the society holds to be true.

'The Puritan's idea of hell is a place where everybody has to mind his own business.

I don't know why people like being oppressed.

I can't stay within the constructs of societal expectations.

We are not free, it was not intended we should be. A book of rules is placed in our cradle, and we never get rid of it until we reach our graves. Then we are free, and only then.

Scholars, who pride themselves on speaking their minds, often engage in a form of self-censorship which is called "realism." To be "realistic" in dealing with a problem is to work only among the alternatives which the most powerful in society put forth. It is as if we are all confined to a, b, c, or d in the multiple choice test, when we know there is another possible answer. American society, although it has more freedom of expression than most societies in the world, thus sets limits beyond which respectable people are not supposed to think or speak.

The more defensive a society, the more conformist.

Religion becomes a matter of belief, and belief acts as a limitation on the mind; and the mind then is never free.

America is neither free nor brave, but a land of tight, iron-clanking little wills, everybody trying to put it over everybody else, and a land of men absolutely devoid of the real courage of trust, trust in life's sacred spontaneity. They can't trust life until they can control it.

Each human being is unique, each with their own qualities, instincts, forms of pleasure, and desire for adventure. However, society always imposes on us a collective ways of behaving, and people never stop to wonder why they should behave like that. They just accept it, the way typists accepted the fact that the QWERTY keyboard was the best possible one. Have you ever met anyone is your entire life who asked why the hands of a clock should go in one particular direction and not the other?

In a Society in which there is no law, and in theory no compulsion, the only arbiter of behaviour is public opinion. But public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law. When human beings are governed by "thou shalt not", the individual can practise a certain amount of eccentricity: when they are supposedly governed by "love" or "reason", he is under continuous pressure to make him behave and think in exactly the same way as everyone else.

Such figures as Boy George do not disturb me nearly so much as do those relentlessly hetero (sexual?) keepers of the keys and seals, those who know what the world needs in the way of order and who are ready and willing to supply that order.

Human society as a whole is a vast brainwashing machine whose semantic rules and sex roles create a social robot.

I don't belong to a working system. They only select people if you belong to one so you can be controlled.

The nation was not founded by habitual groupthinkers. But it stands a fair chance of being destroyed by them.

I'd rather stay here with all the madmen than perish with the sadmen roaming free.

It's fortunately a kind of society we live in where we can be diverse. People can take different paths and not feel like they're doing something wrong.

So society has strangled in its asylums all those it wanted to get rid of or protect itself from, because they refused to become its accomplices in certain great nastinesses.

... the public and the private worlds are inseparably connected ... the tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other.

Human beings are free except when humanity needs them.

What! I don't care about being a princess! And since I'm already a young lady, how else could I behave? That's like asking a fish not to swim!" ~Princess Eilonwy, daughter of Angharad, daughter of Regat, of the Royal house of Llyr

Whatever has not come under the sway of man is wild. In this sense original and independent men are wild - not tamed and broken by society.

Deviants are sacrificed to increase group solidarity