Cultural Norms Quotes

I am somebody who is not too fond of fancy or commercial stuff, like dancing around trees. Even in the 20 films I have done in South, none had any of such stuff.

I am continually fascinated at the difficulty intelligent people have in distinguishing what is controversial from what is merely offensive.

Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split.

Our big social institutions do not reflect human nature; they distort it.

It is society which, fashioning us in its image, fills us with religious, political, and moral beliefs that control our actions.

Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.

A sane person to an insane society must appear insane.

If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts.

Politics is downstream from culture.

Among human beings, the subjection of women is much more complete at a certain level of civilization than it is among savages. And the subjection is always reinforced by morality.

[Turkish women] had lived free of the veil for 5,000 years, and had been covered only in the last 600 years.

Whoever controls the media—the images—controls the culture.

Modesty died when clothes were born.

Most men's conscience, habits, and opinions are borrowed from convention and gather continually comforting assurances from the same social consensus that originally suggested them.

Tradition was safety; change was danger.

For the most part we inherit our opinions. We are the heirs of habits and mental customs. Our beliefs, like the fashion of our garments, depend on where we were born. We are molded and fashioned by our surroundings.

I guess the majority of people who want to ban certain musicians are the ones who are so proud of everything America stands for.

[My grandmother] is a typical white person.

How powerful social mores are! Only a spider's web lies across the volcano, yet it refrains from erupting.

I jumped off a bridge in Italy, is that culturally insensitive? Is saying 'mamma mia' culturally insensitive?

We live in a world where in the movie you can disembowel someone in a youth hostel in Romania, but you can't show people having sex. I think it's weird.

In the stable periods of history, meaning was supplied in the context of a coherent community and traditionally prescribed patterns of culture. Today we cannot count on any such inheritance.

Manners are of more importance than laws. Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation, like that of the air we breathe.

The commonsense rules of the "real world" are a fragile collection of socially reinforced illusions.

Gentlemen use books as Gentlewomen handle their flowers, who in the morning stick them in their heads, and at night strawe them at their heeles.