John Perry Barlow Quotes

Everything is arranged so that it be this way, this is what is called culture.

The question we all face is what sort of culture we will live in for the rest of our lives and then hand on to the next generation - one that embraces these most basic of values, or one that collapses because of their absence.

It has been said that a nation reveals its character by the values it upholds.

The primary function of myth is to validate an existing social order. Myth enshrines conservative social values, raising tradition on a pedestal. It expresses and confirms, rather than explains or questions, the sources of cultural attitudes and values.

Protestant Christianity ... tutored the first generations of Americans. It provided what we today would call the value system of the society.

Culture is more important than politics.

Culture is more important than politics and government.

Manners are the root, laws only the trunk and branches. Manners are the archetypes of laws. Manners are laws in their infancy; laws are manners fully grown,--or, manners are children, which, when they grow up, become laws.

If someone were to put a proposition before men bidding them choose, after examination, the best customs in the world, each nation would certainly select its own.

Everybody has values. Now, you know it may be formed in a secular setting, it may be formed in an intellectual setting, but everybody comes forward with values.

Moral values, and a culture and a religion, maintaining these values are far better than laws and regulations.

The community of masses of human beings has produced an order of life in regulated channels which connects individuals in a technically functioning organisation, but not inwardly from the historicity of their souls.

An attack on values is inevitably seen as an act of subversion.

No matter what town you are in, there is some social order and a different yardstick to chart. In New York, people create things like schools and speaking languages and second homes.

The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines.

Major religions usually remain major because they sanctify whatever is the social stricture of the day.

It's very much simpler to get rid of any written rule you choose than it is an item of customary morality... while laws are preserved on tablets of wood or stone, customary morality is engraved deep in our living souls

I asked my mother, 'Why shouldn't I act?' She said, 'Nobody in the family has acted, so why should you?'

The totality of beliefs and sentiments common to the average members of a society forms a determinate system with a life of its own. It can be termed the collective or creative consciousness.

Cultures grow on the vine of tradition.

We don't claim to have perfect morals, but at least we have a huge area of things that, while legal, are beneath us. We won't do them. Currently, there's a culture in Americathat says that anything that won't send you to prison is OK.

Values, both those that we approve and those that we don't, have roots as deep as creosote rings, and live as long and grow as slowly

Customs tell a man who he is, where he belongs, what he must do. Better illogical customs than none; men cannot live together without them.

When mores are sufficient, laws are unnecessary. When mores are insufficient, laws are unenforceable.

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