Owen Barfield Quotes

I go out into America, and I am literally navigating a minefield. Godliness has become abnormal.

Laws are often made to express collective ethical principles, to establish a climate of opinion …

A code of behavior is an inevitable part of life in any community, and if we hadn't inherited ours, we should have had to invent one.

Changes in language often reflect the changing values of a culture.

In olden days a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking. Now, Heaven knows, anything goes. The world has gone mad today, and good's bad today, and black's white today, and day's night today.

It seems fair to say that while the moral standards of the nineteenth century persisted almost unchanged into the twentieth, moral practices changed sharply, and that though the standards of the nineteenth century persisted the institutions that had sustained them and the sanctions that had enforced them lost influence and authority.

The only way to drive out bad culture is with good culture

It was no longer esteemed infamous for a Roman to survive his honor and independence.

I'll tell you what's the greatest power under heaven, and that is public opinion-the ruling belief in society about what is right and what is wrong, what is honourable and what is shameful. That's the steam that is to work the engines.

Do you know what morals are? Morals are an obedience to rules that people laid down to help you live among them.

Culturally, it's very hard to change people's attitudes about public space.

In the battle for preserving sound social and moral norms, many religious institutions can no longer be counted as allies.

We need to create a society in which civility rules over cynicism and apathy.

Language furnishes the best proof that a law accepted by a community is a thing that is tolerated and not a rule to which all freely consent.

A concern with 'public morality' is - if not the last refuge of a scoundrel - the first foray of the fascist.

Communities have a responsibility to assist the family in promoting wholesome entertainment. What a community tolerates will become tomorrow's standard for today's youth.

Never create by law what can be accomplished by morality.

As for language, almost everything goes now. That is not to say that verbal taboos have disappeared, but merely that they have shifted somewhat. In my youth, for example, there were certain words you couldn't say in front of a girl; now you can say them, but you can't say 'girl'.

Moral standards cannot be changed by battle and cannot be changed by ballot.

A person of “good character” was one who acted in accordance with the expectations of his community

Every thinking man, when he thinks, realizes that the teachings of the Bible are so interwoven and intertwined with our whole civic and social life that it would be literally, I do not mean figuratively, but literally impossible for us to figure what the loss would be if these teachings were removed. We would lose all the standards by which we now judge both public and private morals; all the standards toward which we, with more or less resolution, strive to raise ourselves.

Unnecessary customs live a brutally short life in America.

A new language always reflects a new point of view, and the gradual unconscious popularization of new words, or of old words used in new ways, is a sure sign of a profound change in people's articulation of the world.

To be good, according to the vulgar standard of goodness, is obviously quite easy. It merely requires a certain amount of sordid terror, a certain lack of imaginative thought, and a certain low passion for middle-class respectability.

If one asks the whence derives the authority of fundamental ends, since they cannot be stated and justified merely by reason, one can only answer: they exist in a healthy society as powerful traditions, which act upon the conduct and aspirations and judgments of the individuals; they are there, that is, as something living, without its being necessary to find justification for their existence.