Social Restraint Quotes

No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other fastened about his own neck.

Chimps act the way they feel unless they are afraid of reprisal if they do so. But that doesn't apply to humans.

I think everyone holds back. I am always censoring myself and I'm sorry about it. But I always have to consider whether my remarks might cause someone pain.

I grant this mode of secluding boys from the intercourse of private families has a tendency to make them scholars, but our business is to make them men, citizens, and Christians. The vices of young people are generally learned from each other. The vices of adults seldom infect them. By separating them from each other, therefore, in their hours of relaxation from study, we secure their morals from a principal source of corruption, while we improve their manners by subjecting them to those restraints which the difference of age and sex naturally produce in private families.

I am convinced that the majority of people to-day have good, generous feelings which they can never know, never experience, because of some fear, some repression. I do not believe that people would be villains, thieves, murderers and sexual criminals if they were freed from legal restraint.

Political correctness is a bit like a granny, a maiden aunt arriving at a party when everyone's having a good time. And she comes in, they all start sort of buttoning up and becoming self-conscious and behaving properly and then when she leaves, you can have fun again.

Democracy is something more, vastly more, than a mere form of government by which society is restrained into free and orderly life. It is a moral entity, a spiritual force, as well. And these are things which live only and alone in the atmosphere of liberty.

The 'reality' shows on television, the Internet, these things have encouraged people to behave with less and less restraint. We are broadcasting our emotions in public in a way that has never happened before.

Never laughing too loudly in a restaurant no matter how good the joke.

Freedom is a personal experience; a free society is an association of free individuals, nothing else. Freedom consists simply in the absence of external restraints on thought and behavior. Yet, because the individual, in his efforts to improve upon his circumstances, not infrequently transgresses the equal freedom of his fellow man, restraint becomes a necessary condition of social living; it is the means of maintaining an equilibrium, or justice.

Oh my God, I never really tweet, but there's a moment every day I write one and then delete it.

Isn't it strange that we talk least about the things we think about most?

No one has a right to obstruct another exercising his faculties innocently for the relief of sensibilities made a part of his nature.

The fact that boys are allowed to exist at all is evidence of remarkable Christian forbearance among men - were it not for a mawkish humanitarianism, coupled with imperfect digestive powers, we should devour our young, as Nature intended.

Most of the time, people say negative things for a reaction, and I can't even bear to give them the satisfaction. So there's something that I gain from feeling like I'm the bigger person, from walking away from a situation.

The exclusion of wine from the list of refreshments has turned out exceedingly well. There is a great deal of dissipation here [in Washington DC] At the reception of the British Minister, and that of the Mexican Minister, disgraceful things were done by young men, made reckless by too much wine. Hence the necessity of our course is obvious, and is commended in unexpected quarters. Many of the foreign gentlemen speak of it with approval. We shall stick to it.

Friends are to be feared, not so much for what they make us do as what they keep us from doing.

Conscience was the barmaid of the Victorian soul. Recognizing that human beings were fallible and that their failings, though regrettable, must be humored, conscience would permit, rather ungraciously perhaps, the indulgence of a number of carefully selected desires.

Observe moderation [or: Keep balanced]. [Halt Mass!]

I am a very shy person who is just close to himself. So I would refrain from talking about my personal life.

The main business of religions is to purify, control, and restrain that excessive and exclusive taste for well-being which men acquire in times of equality.

Dare we linger, dare we skate? Dare we laugh or celebrate, knowing we may strain the ice? Preserve the ice at any price?

Political correctness means nothing to me. Nothing. It's the new Puritanism, darling. Preventing us from expressing ourselves.