Joseph Wood Krutch Quotes

I never leaf through a copy of National Geographic without realizing how lucky we are to live in a society where it is traditional to wear clothes.

I have no doubt that if you were to ask a cannibal, he would plead his religion for the heinous acts he does.

The permissive society has been allowed to become a dirty phrase. A better phrase is the civilized society.

How many things both just and unjust are sanctioned by custom?

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

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

I guess there isn’t a rule book for what might be unacceptable to do to another human being.

I'm leery of legislative solutions to what is morality.

We live in a world where everyone thinks they do the right thing, so they are entitled to do the wrong thing. So ends can justify the means.

Custom is our nature. What are our natural principles but principles of custom?

Morality is the custom of one's country and the current feeling of one's peers.

We find the people to be no better than their laws.

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.

History requires us to judge the figures of the past not by our moral standards but by those of the ages in which they lived and worked.

Human beings tend to regard the conventions of their own societies as natural, often as sacred.

There is no possible line of conduct which has at some time and place been condemned, and which has not at some other time and place been enjoined as a duty.

Each person calls barbarism whatever is not his or her own practice.... We may call Cannibals barbarians, in respect to the rulesof reason, but not in respect to ourselves, who surpass them in every kind of barbarity.

Every society gets the kind of criminal it deserves.

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

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

Morality makes stupid.- Custom represents the experiences of men of earlier times as to what they supposed useful and harmful - but the sense for custom (morality) applies, not to these experiences as such, but to the age, the sanctity, the indiscussability of the custom. And so this feeling is a hindrance to the acquisition of new experiences and the correction of customs: that is to say, morality is a hindrance to the development of new and better customs: it makes stupid.

Custom ... changes the very nature of things; and what was honorable a thousand years ago, may probably be looked upon as infamous now.

Were the judgments of mankind correct, custom would be regulated by the good. But it is often far otherwise in point of fact; for, whatever the many are seen to do, forthwith obtains the force of custom. But human affairs have scarcely ever been so happily constituted as that the better course pleased the greater number. Hence the private vices of the multitude have generally resulted in public error, or rather that common consent in vice which these worthy men would have to be law.

Morals were restrictive, but they were grounded on human experience.