Changing Social Norms Quotes

It's all that the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date.

I still can't get over the idea that respectable adults now go to see superhero movies and that such films get reviewed in the 'New Yorker.' Clearly, I am seriously out of step with the times.

Taboos are falling across our culture like dominoes. What was unspeakable yesterday dominates talk shows today.

The youth of the present day are quite monstrous. They have absolutely no respect for dyed hair.

When I first started drinking, everybody was doing it. That was before they discovered marijuana and all that. It was the late 50s, early 60s - it was the beginnings of the rock 'n' roll era. The main drink was like wine. And even that was a romantic throwback to something.

Remember 'The Brady Bunch' TV show? That 1970s family had a full-time live-in housekeeper called Alice. Mrs. Brady worked at the PTA and did community work. She didn't clean her own house. That was middle class. Now you have to be very rich to employ a housekeeper. Everything it meant to be middle class has changed dramatically.

I waited patiently - years - for the pendulum to swing the other way, for men to start reading Jane Austen, learn how to knit, pretend to love cosmos, organize scrapbook parties, and make out with each other while we leer. And then we'd say, Yeah, he's a Cool Guy.

I think the activism of the 1960s had a very definite civilizing effect on the whole society in all kinds of ways. So lots of things that by now are almost taken for granted were heretical in the 1960s. We had anti-sodomy laws until not many years ago.

There is little reason left for society to respect women as it once did. Women get knocked up. They don't marry. They have abortions. They go to bars. They get knocked up again.

I worry about kids today - because of the sexual revolution, they're going to grow up and never know what "dirty" means.

What we need to do is open our eyes, smell the coffee and just understand what the society has become. Today, I can discuss many things with my 15-year-old son which I could not talk about with my father.

The young people, they don't knock on the door politely and say "May I come in?" They barge in, they take your seat, and you're obsolete unless you recreate and somehow find grace somewhere else. Another profession may not be like that.

When the movies first started, audiences were dumbstruck to see actresses walking around in evening gowns. They'd never seen anything like that. They wanted to be like those actors and actresses, so the movies informed their behavior. A lot of people started drinking martinis and smoking cigarettes because they felt it was cool.

I grew up in the Fifties and early Sixties, which were still quite conservative, and I wasn't given any information about sex or anything like that... I went out with girls at school because one had to. I didn't experiment with sex for quite a long time.

As much as the social conservatives might not like to hear it, there will be a time when your grandchildren say: 'What was the argument with gay marriage? Who cares?'

The sexual revolution transformed the American West: Now even cowboys can get laid.

Valentine's day has gotten blown way out of proportion. Valentine's Day just used to be for your girlfriend or your wife but now everyone's like 'Oh, happy valentine's day!' I even got a Valentine's Day card from my grandmother. How ridiculous is that? We stopped having sex years ago!

The despotism of custom is on the wane. We are not content to know that things are; we ask whether they ought to be.

I used to get a lot of people saying 'Oh, you are such a lucky granny.' But the fact of the matter is you can be a grandma at 35 these days.

All that Swinging Sixties. It didn’t do anyone any good, did it? Easy sex and the Pill. Marriages were ruined. I never did approve. I never really enjoyed the sex.

Nowadays, all the married men live like bachelors, and all the bachelors like married men.

Your mothers get mighty shocked at you girls nowadays, but in her day, her mother was just on the verge of sending her to reform school.

There is a subject - there is a research that says a man thinks about sex every 12 seconds. And so when an artist expresses something that's sexual in music it is a reflection of our reality. If we want that reality changed, then we have to do things that affect the core.

People ask could I have written the show I wrote in 1990 now, and I don't think I could. I think it's much easier to offend people nowadays. People have grown quite sensitive, I think.

Obviously the bar is much higher now for a behavior to be scandalous. Social media has really changed the way people live. It's not a new impulse; it's just being enacted in a new way.