Social Rituals Quotes

They [the Persians] are accustomed to deliberate on matters of the highest moment when warm with wine; but whatever they in this situation may determine is again proposed to them on the morrow, in their cooler moments, by the person in whose house they had before assembled. If at this time also it meet their approbation, it is executed; otherwise it is rejected. Whatever also they discuss when sober, is always a second time examined after they have been drinking.

I marvel again at the nakedness of men's lives: the showers right out in the open, the body exposed for inspection and comparison, the public display of privates. What is it for? What purposes of reassurance does it serve? The flashing of a badge, look, everyone, all is in order, I belong here. Why don't women have to prove to one another that they are women? Some form of unbuttoning, some split-crotch routine, just as casual. A doglike sniffing.

... I doubt the capacity of the human animal for being dignified in ceremony.

Saturday night is when my hair would be fixed up and that was my memory.

In our society many of the old rituals have lost much of their power. New ones have not arisen.

We don't have too much ritual in our life anymore. And these life symbols which people rely on to keep their feeling of well being, that life is not too bad after all are required more and more.

Administrations had come and gone in Pennsylvania Avenue, but many old entertaining traditions had survived - thru habit and not thru merit.

People crown kings and queens at homecoming parades all the time. We do a lot of things in our society that are simply symbolic.

I believe in courtesy. It is the way we avoid hurting people's feelings. She thought that maybe, just maybe, western civilization was in decline because people did not take time to take tea at four o'clock.

...when a phone call competes for attention with a real-world conversation, it wins. Everyone knows the distinctive high-and-dry feeling of being abandoned for a phone call, and of having to compensate - with quite elaborate behaviours = for the sudden half-disappearance of the person we were just speaking to. 'Go ahead!' we say. 'Don't mind us! Oh look, here's a magazine I can read!' When the call is over, other rituals come into play, to minimise the disruption caused and to restore good feeling.

The custom of saluting [i.e., embracing] ladies by their relatives and friends was introduced, it is said, by the early Romans, not out of respect originally, but to find by their breath whether they had been drinking wine, this being criminal for women to do, as it sometimes led to adultery.

Nothing seems at first sight less important than the outward form of human actions, yet there is nothing upon which men set more store: they grow used to everything except to living in a society which has not their own manners.

The cocktail party - as the name itself indicates - was originally invented by dogs. They are simply bottom-sniffings raised to the rank of formal ceremonies.

It's called male bonding. You'll never get it. I believe women are as capable as men, deserve equal pay—and that one day, should be sooner than later, in my opinion, the right woman can and should be leader of the free world. But you can't understand the male bonding rituals any more than men can understand why the vast majority of women are obsessed with shoes and other footwear.

More often writing soliloquies of suffering and consolation than collective songs like the dirge, elegists have discovered that lyric sequences can provide a powerful means of addressing the tensions between grief's inchoate emotion and social rituals of mourning.

A funeral is not death, any more than baptism is birth or marriage union. All three are the clumsy devices, coming now too late, now too early, by which Society would register the quick motions of man.

Have you ever thought about why, all over the world, in every culture, in every society, there are a few days in the year for celebration? These few days for celebration are just a compensation - because these societies have taken away all celebration in your life, and if nothing is given to you in compensation, your life can become a danger to the culture. Every culture has to give some compensation to you so that you don't feel completely lost in misery, in sadness. But these compensations are false.

Things that become important to economies become ritualized and become deified. Because I'm Jewish, I always thought it was interesting that in Judaism, salt seals a bargain, particularly the covenant with God. Some people, when they bless bread, they dip it in salt. Same thing exists in Islam.

Those were the days, you know. It's an English thing; as soon as it's gets to 6 pm, you have to go and have a drink. We used to stick to that religiously.

And we had our own laws. I mean, I wrote them. And we had our own customs, and traditions, and proprieties.

Without leisure there can be neither art nor science nor fine conversation, nor any ceremonious performance of the offices of love and friendship.

Introduction - a social ceremony invented by the devil for the gratification of his servants and the plaguing of his enemies.

Cocktail parties ... are usually not parties at all but mass ceremonials designed to clear up at one great stroke a wealth of obligations.

There is a close meshing with the ritual properties of persons and with the egocentric forms of territoriality.

Women are storytellers, they are communicators. They'll go and sit around a table and talk about their first date, their first smoke, their first lipstick, whatever it is. Those rituals of life, marriages and death aren't part of the language of men.