Margaret Cho Quotes

No tendency is quite so strong in human nature as the desire to lay down rules of conduct for other people.

Society is one vast conspiracy for carving one into the kind of statue likes, and then placing it in the most convenient niche it has.

The idea is that in any situation, people have a notion as to who they are and how they should behave. And if you don't behave according to your identity, you pay a cost.

Society just has a way of inhibiting you, which is good and bad.

People are going to behave however the social norms permit, and beyond that.

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

If society fits you comfortably enough, you call it freedom.

We delude ourselves into believing that morality comes from somewhere else, whereas in reality we behave as we've been told to behave.

The whole system of society tells you what to do.

Something I've always written about is social expectations: that the eyes of the community are on you all the time, expecting you to line up with certain social norms, certain behaviours. Whenever you forgot about them, they'd be strongly reiterated to you, in no uncertain terms.

If a community decides this is how you're going to dress and these are the punishments, who are we to say different?

A regard for reputation and the judgment of the world may sometimes be felt where conscience is dormant.

We limit ourselves. We're told to act and behave in certain way from birth.

Disgust and shame are inherently hierarchical; they set up ranks and orders of human beings. They are also inherently connected with restrictions on liberty in areas of non-harmful conduct.

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.

I always expect people to behave much better than I do. When they actually behave worse, I am frankly incredulous.

For the superior morality, of which we hear so much, we too would desire to be thankful: at the same time, it were but blindness to deny that this superior morality is properly rather an inferior criminality, produced not by greater love of Virtue, but by greater perfection of Police; and of that far subtler and stronger Police, called Public Opinion.

Most people believe you have to have some moral absolutes if you want to hold back chaos.

Most conduct is guided by norms rather than by laws. Norms are voluntary and are effective because they are enforced by peer pressure.

I don't want to hear any words like that while I'm here. Scout, you'll get in trouble if you go around saying things like that. You want to grow up to be a lady, don't you?' I said not particularly.

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

Our morality seems to be only a check on the ultimate domination of force, just as our politeness is a check on the impulse of every pig to put his feet in the trough.

To claim that theft or adultery or lying are "evil" simply reflects our degraded idea of good-—that it has something to do with respect for property, respectability, and sincerity.

I'm not like a politician that goes around talking about family values. And I can't get fired from being a funny person because I did something that most people are disapproving of. I think people are just obsessed with this morality that people perceive as being the right and wrong way of doing stuff.

Respectability is joining chastity in the museum of dead issues.