Honor Culture Quotes

In Turkey, the Kamalist elite ignored the religious leadership, the countryside, and the Kurds. Creating groups of very unhappy people who cohered into a new political opposition. The same happened in Israel, and Menachem Begin connected with them. Today, both Erdogan and Netanyahu rule from a support base that is more religious, more rural, and less educated, where honor and nationalism are important. That makes the relationship between the two very hard.

Once we accept violence as an adaptation, it makes sense that its expression is calibrated to the environment. The same individual will behave differently if he comes of age in Detroit, Mich., versus Windsor, Ontario; in New York in the 1980s versus New York now; in a culture of honor versus a culture of dignity.

While the Lord might insist that vengeance was His, no male Highlander of my acquaintance had ever thought it right that the Lord should be left to handle such things without assistance.

Islam, as practiced from Malaysia to Morocco, is a shame-based, patriarchal culture that values honor and face-saving from the family to the public square. Which is why the bullying often works to silence critics of Islamic extremism.

I think human society for tens of thousands of years has sent young men out in small groups to do things that are necessary but very dangerous. And they've always gotten killed doing it. And they've always turned it into a matter of honor and a way of gaining acceptance back into society if they survived.

My father owned pit bulls when I was young. He sometimes fought them. My brother and a lot of the men in my community owned pit bulls as well: sometimes they fought them for honor, never for money.

There is no forgiveness. For women. A man may lose his honor and regain it again. But a woman cannot. She cannot.

A culture of honor is celebrating who a person is without stumbling over who they're not.