Freda Adler Quotes

Virtue is relative to the actions and ages of each of us in all that we do.

Virtue is too often merely local.

If enough people openly engage in conduct once considered reprehensible, we rewrite the rule book and assume that God, as a good democrat, will go along.

Because of the diverse conditions of humans, it happens that some acts are virtuous to some people, as appropriate and suitable to them, while the same acts are immoral for others, as inappropriate to them.

It may be very generous in one person to offer what it would be ungenerous in another to accept.

A crime persevered in a thousand centuries ceases to be a crime, and becomes a virtue. This is the law of custom, and custom supersedes all other forms of law.

What is morality in any given time or place? It is what the majority then and there happen to like, and immorality is what they dislike.

The way that social norms become social norms is not through any systematic process. It is through a flowering of an understanding within a culture.

In Japan, violence isn't as controversial as it is in the West.

When people see some things as good, other things become bad.

So our virtues lie in the interpretation of the time

The virtues of society are the vices of the saints.

Justice is as much a matter of fashion as charm is.

What moralist can deny that well-bred and vicious people are much more agreeable than their virtuous counterparts? Having crimes to atone for, they provisionally solicit indulgence by showing leniency toward the defects of their judges. Thus they pass for excellent folk.

... Virtue owns a more eternal foe Than Force or Fraud: old Custom, legal Crime, And bloody Faith the foulest birth of Time.

I hold that such a question can never arise except in a society of cannibals.

Notions of Good and Evil depend entirely on social context. It is not that people are good or bad, they are raised in an aberrant or twisted environment.

It wasn't possible just to rid oneself, simply, of the norms through which one is constituted.

I cannot imagine any crime worse than taking a life, can you? -It'd depend whose life.

When a church reaches up beyond its group and tries to enforce its standards upon a society that doesn't accept these standards, and perhaps for good reason, perhaps for bad reason, but anyway this is the problem we face in pluralistic society, that not necessarily every standard that every church tries to enforce upon the society is from the society's standpoint a good standard.

You can't move so fast that you try to change the mores faster than people can accept it.

What you think in your own mind to be good, or what people of the world think is good, is not necessarily good.

to a Southerner it is faux pas, not sins, that matter in this world.

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.