Erving Goffman Quotes

If you act weird, people are going to treat you weird, but if you're just yourself, people respond to that.

We all are [normal]. Their idea of normal just happens to be different to some other people's idea of normal. But this is the world we live in. Some people simply cannot accept something that is outside of their experience.

If you're a kid who is always on the outside hoping to be on the inside, you're watching a lot. You're trying to figure out how to become a normal person in a society that considers you weird.

Socially I never was an outsider. I have never thought of the conflict element before frankly, but perhaps it was wanting to belong, and at the same time wanting to retain one's own personality.

As a social primate species, we modulate our morals with signals from family, friends and social groups with whom we identify because in our evolutionary past, those attributes helped individuals to survive and reproduce.

Social psychology is especially interested in the effect which the social group has in the determination of the experience and conduct of the individual member.

I really wanted to go to high school and be normal.

What surprises me is when people give me their mobile number. The other day, someone on a bus asked if I swear. I said I try not to, but of course I'm just a normal person.

When I was a teenager in Iceland people would throw rocks and shout abuse at me because they thought I was weird. I never got that in London no matter what I wore.

You don't need to have Asperger's to feel bewildered in a culture that relies so heavily on inconsequential chit-chat to grease the wheels of day-to-day life.

I'm not stiff. I'm normal. It's not normal to walk down the street shaking hands with five thousand people.

I had a tremendous amount of gay friends, so my whole life was basically like that... I never noticed who was gay or who was straight.

The thing that keeps me being a performer is my interest in society's obsession with identity, because I'm not sure that I really believe identity exists.

I don't know that I'm not normal, because usually, when I tell people the things I do, either their jaw drops or they look at me shocked, but I'm sure I do normal things - everyone eats, that kind of stuff.

We're a social species, and we want to get along with the people we like and who are like us. That's just good adaptive behaviour. We're more likely to accept something if we hear it from a friend, whereas we're sceptical of people who are not like us - which is what leads to racism, nationalism, sexism and all forms of bigotry.

When you've got society calling you a burden and talking about how much money you're costing the state, it's bound to impact negatively on your mental health.

In high school, you re either a bully, a jock or a nerd, and I somehow tried to jump between camps by using humor. It's amazing how you can blend in with that.

You can't get along in society without an identity.

Not everybody needs to be a weirdo.

I don't even know anyone who hasn't watched 'Sex and the City.' If you didn't, we can't be friends.

As I walked down the street while talking on the phone, sophisticated New Yorkers gaped at the sight of someone actually moving around while making a phone call. Remember that in 1973, there weren't cordless telephones, let alone cellular phones.

I know, for a fact, that I'm a very different person on my own than I am with someone else. We are different with each other. These things are constantly adjusted. And that's true of humans. That's not just true of famous people.

Benedict XVI kept saying that homosexuals are deviant. They're not deviant. They're deviant only if you say that anyone who is different from me is abnormal.

Some people were just getting on with their lives, chatting, being young. It simply wouldn't do.

You don't have to be disabled to be different, because everybody's different.