Steve Coogan Quotes

My dad's quite a conservative person, and he brought me up to be very questioning of the commercial world. He looked down on pop culture. I definitely got the impression that pop was evil and that Britney Spears was evil.

I was a victim of the American Dream, the bourgeois, middle-class dream. All I wanted was a little piece of life, to be married, to have children.

Ever wonder why people are so determined to reach for white picket fences, supposed normalcy, a nuclear family? Well, try growing up without one.

I grew up in a conservative household. That was the life of the time in Egypt: a conservative, middle-class household.

None of my sisters are in the movies, nor are my nieces going to be. That's how Dutt 'sahab,' my dad, brought up the girls in the family, and I am just carrying his thought forward.

Social conservatives say who drives the bus.

I don't like overt traditionalism.

The masses of the people are no lovers of changes which run counter to immemorial custom

The traditional family has an intrinsic as well as an instrumental value, and that is the real reason so many conservatives defend it.

Chilean society is conservative, but U.S. society is puritanical.

Someone said, and rightfully, that "property is theft'." There's no way a man can stand and tell me that he owns an apple tree. I just don't believe you. And so this pursuit of position and money and power, they are all wrapped up into one package that I think is crippling, debilitating and limiting. And unfortunately, people get sucked into it and then they've got you on the treadmill. You know: ''You've got to have a good job'' and "You've got to have a good education'' - which is another word for indoctrination. We're never going to rise above these limitations we've placed on ourselves.

Of course, mothers were very conventional, everything was very conventional. You had to have approval.

Conservatism, I believe, happens to be what happens when people behave according to a certain moral code, a certain sense of right and wrong, people that are accepting responsibility for themselves. Conservatism is what happens when you're a good citizen.

I'd always ask my grandma, who was so, so smart, why she didn't work, and she would explain that her parents didn't approve of her working after she had children. She didn't feel like she had choices.

What is morality but immemorial custom? Conscience is the chief of conservatives.

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.

Thanks for the American dream, to vulgarize and falsify until the bare lies shine through. Thanks for a country where nobody's allowed to mind their own business.

The most conservative persons I ever met are college undergraduates.

Take the so-called standard of living. What do most people mean by "living"? They don’t mean living. They mean the latest and closest plural approximation to singular prenatal passivity which science, in its finite but unbounded wisdom, has succeeded in selling their wives.

The more he identifies with the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own life and his own desires. The spectacle’s estrangement from the acting subject is expressed by the fact that the individual’s gestures are no longer his own; they are the gestures of someone else who represents them to him.

Conservatives believe in the ties that bind us. Society is stronger when we make vows to each other and we support each other. I don't support gay marriage in spite of being a conservative. I support gay marriage because I am a conservative.

Women and love are underpinnings. Examine them and you threaten the very structure of culture.

Considering the absence of legal coercion, the surprising thing is that men have for so long, and, on the whole, so reliably, adhered to what we might call the breadwinner ethic.

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, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor. It alone prevents the hardest and most repulsive walks of life from being deserted by those brought up to tread therein.

I owe a great deal to the church for everything in which I believe. I am very glad that I was brought up strictly. I was a very serious child. There was not a lot of fun and sparkle in my life.