Michelangelo Antonioni Quotes

People watch movies - and it's vague ideas, it's vague notions, but people pick up on these things, that they are supposed to think certain ways or that they're not supposed to think, basically, and they don't.

I do not want to be a robot, a cog in society who answers 'yes' because 'yes' is considered the appropriate answer. Neither do I want to be a protestor. I just want to seek out what lies underneath the veils of politeness and programming that I've been given as a person in this society.

Often we don't notice the stringent rules to which our culture subjects us.

Culture has worked by coming to exercise a form of mind control over us. We willingly accept and even embrace this mind control, and probably without even knowing it.

One isn't born one's self. One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people's ideas - and you have to work through it all.

A mind cannot be independent of culture.

In some extremely important ways, people are what you expect them to be, or at least they behave as you expect them to behave.

We are strange beings, we seem to go free, but we go in chains--chains of training, custom, convention, association, environment--in a word, Circumstance--and against these bonds the strongest of us struggle in vain.

Why does your mind conform? Have you ever asked? Are you aware that you are conforming to a pattern? It doesn't matter what that pattern is, whether you have established a pattern for yourself or it has been established for you.

We're often too entrenched in existing structures and are so primed to think that if we grew up with the values and the norms, they have to be correct.

The public never knows what he wants, but he always wants what he knows.

Cultural constraints condition and limit our choices, shaping our characters with their imperatives.

Look what is happening in the world - we are being conditioned by society, by the culture we live in, and that culture is the product of man. There is nothing holy, or divine, or eternal about culture.

I think it's important to see the parallels, and to understand that our masculine and feminine roles are relatively new in human history. Both gender and race are inventions that go deep because we have been raised with them, but they are still inventions.

The accidental prescriptions of authority, when time has procured them veneration, are often confounded with the laws of nature, and those rules are supposed coeval with reason, of which the first rise cannot be discovered.

Chaste is she whom no one has asked.

The rule is not written anywhere, it's not etched in any  -  but, I mean, that's the prevailing attitude of this entire society. Don't have an adventure.

Society becomes how you behave.

There are three musts that hold us back: "I must do well. You must treat me well. And the world must be easy." And I sometimes think that as long as we keep the second must, which is socially learned, then some screwballs 100 years from now will manufacture atomic bombs in their bathtub and maybe annihilate the whole human race because they demand that the rest of the world must agree with their dogmas. When we don't agree, they may zap us.

We are all engaged in the task of peeling off the false selves, the programmed selves, the selves created by our families, our culture, our religions. It is an enormous task because the history of women has been as incompletely told as the history of blacks.

All of us, as bodies, are in the active position of figuring out how to live with and against the constructions - or norms - that help to form us.

What I want to know is: Why is it important to have visible stomach muscles? I grew up in an era (the Paleolithic) when people kept their stomach muscles discreetly out of sight.

I have not said your values are wrong. But neither are they right. They are simply judgments. Assessments. Decisions. For the most part, they are decisions made not by you, but by someone else. Your parents, perhaps. Your religion. Your teachers, historians, politicians.

Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal.

We are born into a world in which sexual possibilities are narrowly circumscribed. . . . We are programmed by the culture as surely as rats are programmed to make the arduous way through the scientist's maze, and that programming operates on every level of choice and action.