The way of the world is to make laws, but follow custom.
Where a bad custom has been in existence for any length of time, most people grow to regard it as part of the order of nature.
The conception of what is normal varies not only with the culture but also within the same culture, in the course of time.
Culture is a product of law. And laws create norms for society. This is why anyone who wants to change the culture of a country must try to change the norms of the country.
Does anyone in this land act like they're supposed to?
...how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity!
Recall that people like to do what most people think it is right to do; recall too that people like to do what most people actually do.
Vidal gives the impression of believing that the entire heterosexual edifice - registry offices, 'Romeo and Juliet,' the disposable diaper - is just a sorry story of self-hypnosis and mass hysteria: a hoax, a racket, or sheer propaganda.
For as good habits of the people require good laws to support them, so laws, to be observed, need good habits on the part of the people.
Is anyone human actually normal? I'm beginning to think being normal is actually abnormal.
A cultural shift is not always an ideological one - or at least not always the one you imagine. Our norms are always evolving.
There was nothing abnormal about it when homosexuality was the norm.
In order to deviate successfully, one has to have at least a passing acquaintance with whatever norm one expects to deviate from.
Sanity is only that which is within the frame of reference of conventional thought.
We arrange our lives-even the best and boldest men and women that exist, just as much as the most limited-with reference to what society conventionally rules and makes right.
There is hardly any deviancy, no matter how reprehensible in one context, which is not extolled as a virtue in another. There are no natural crimes, only legal ones.
Culture is everything you don't have to do.
Let me say one thing to clarify my position. I think we can take distance from norm but I think we are also mired in norm, "empêtrés", I think you say in French. And I think the choices we can make are only in a certain struggle with the norms out of which we're constituted.
The way that social norms become social norms is not through any systematic process. It is through a flowering of an understanding within a culture.
A great deal has been written about the forthrightness of the moderns shocking the Victorians, but there is no shock like the one which the forthrightness of the Victorians can give a modern.
Everybody should be normal. Everybody should be nice. I think they go hand in hand, and that to me is the default setting.
It wasn't possible just to rid oneself, simply, of the norms through which one is constituted.
In civilized communities men's idiosyncrasies are mitigated by the necessity of conforming to certain rules of behavior. Culture is a mask that hides their faces.
When any practice has become the fixed rule of the society in which we live, it is always wise to adhere to that rule, unless it call upon us to do something that is actually wrong. One should not offend the prejudices of the world, even if one is quite sure that they are prejudices.
Every wrong seems possible today, and is accepted. I don't accept it.
