Suzanne La Follette Quotes

There is nothing more innately human than the tendency to transmute what has become customary into what has been divinely ordained.

The average human being spends three years of life going to the toilet, though the average human being with no physical toilet to go to probably does his or her best to spend less. It is a human behavior that is as revealing as any other about human nature, but only if it can be released from the social straitjacket of nicety.

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

What used to be considered conservative values... are increasingly becoming more mainstream values.

Where a bad custom has been in existence for any length of time, most people grow to regard it as part of the order of nature.

Nature is seldom in the wrong, custom always.

I like playing the social convention. If you're in a period drama, there's always something dancing underneath the surface as a human - but then you always have to conform to the social conventions around you, and those two things get to be juxtaposed against each other. You're being human, but you're trapped within the social convention of the time.

When, in the present world, men behave well, that is no doubt sometimes because they are creatures of habit as well as, sometimes, because they are reasonable.

We are more sensible of what is done against custom than against nature.

Too much society makes a man frivolous; too little, a savage.

Custom is custom: it is built of brass, boiler-iron, granite; facts, reasonings, arguments have no more effect upon it than the idle winds have upon Gibraltar.

What are our natural principles but principles of custom?

What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor

Human paint, produce films and videos; they dance, dream and make music; they engage in political action, exchange goods, perform rituals, build houses start wars, act in plays, try to please patrons- and so on... They contain patterns, press the practitioners to "conform" and in this way mold their thought, their perception, their actions, and their discriminative abilities.

For it was by the Will of God that men were made of a certain bodily shape, were given their natures and their faculties. Whoever destroys His work wages war against God's Creation and God's Will.

There is nothing so extreme that is not allowed by the custom of some nation or other.

Often a quite assified remark becomes sanctified by use and petrified by custom; it is then a permanency, its term of activity a geologic period.

Person-to-person, most people are honest.

Man is the child of customs, not the child of his ancestors.

We have lost confidence in reason because we have learned that man is chiefly a creature of habit and emotion.

I think societal instinct much deeper than sex instinct — and societal repression much more devastating.

We love our habits more than our income, often more than our life.

Why is humanism not the preeminent belief of humankind?

He [God] just seems so man-made to me. There are so many theories, and not everyone can be right. It's human nature to need a religious crutch, and I don't begrudge anyone that. I just don't need one.

Myth, legend, and ritual ... function to maintain a status quo. That makes them singularly bad in coping with change, indeed counterproductive, for change is the enemy of myth.