Personalistic Norm Quotes

There are people who've challenged me on that, but I think there still are. Not everybody looses their virginity when they're 12, there are always these girls who are sort of outside the norm, who have only each other to hang with and talk to. Who are what you would call late bloomers; they don't know it now but when they're 25 they're going to be pretty damn interesting. ~ Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal

We've been playing games since humanity had civilization - there is something primal about our desire and our ability to play games. It's so deep-seated that it can bypass latter-day cultural norms and biases. ~ Jane McGonigal

Dealing with these sexual disorders, you ask 'what is it supposed to look like?' 'what's the norm?' The norm is the heterosexual design of the body ~ Scott Lively

I like bold directors. I like directors that go against the norm in a way ... ~ Nicole Kidman

In this society, the norm of masculinity is phallic aggression. Male sexuality is, by definition, intensely and rigidly phallic. A man's identity is located in his conception of himself as the possessor of a phallus; a man's worth is located in his pride in phallic identity. The main characteristic of phallic identity is that worth is entirely contingent on the possession of a phallus. Since men have no other criteria for worth, no other notion of identity, those who do not have phalluses are not recognized as fully human. ~ Andrea Dworkin

There have been times I've wondered if I could ever allow myself to trust a guy. For the most part, I hate men because the only example I have is my father. But spending all this time with Atlas is changing me. Not in a huge way, I don't think. I still distrust most people. But Atlas is changing me enough to believe that maybe he's an exception to the norm ~ Colleen Hoover

Today, as we have seen, fascism and communism are discredited, but are replaced by a paraphilic consumer culture driven by fantasy, desperately in search of distractions and escalating sensations, and a fundamentalist culture wherein the rigors of a private journey are shunned in favor of an ideology that, at the expense of the paradoxes and complexities of truth, favors one-sided resolutions, black-and-white values, and a privileging of one's own complexes as the norm for others. ~ James Hollis

History teaches that when valuations are extreme, "mean reversion," a move towards historical norms, is likely. Once value stocks turn, the recovery can be fast and intense. ~ Robert D. Arnott

In engineering or medical science, a deep understanding of uncertainty can be a matter of life and death. In politics, over-confidence is often the norm; uncertainty is seen as weakness when really it is a vital part of decision making. In this respect, science delivers an important lesson in humility. In ~ Brian Cox

The most frequent cause of regret for what we have done is because its effects interfere with what we would do. ~ Norm MacDonald

In terms of merit, sports has mathematical statistics. That's how you know who the best player is. ~ Norm MacDonald

Busyness is now the social norm that people feel they must conform to, Burnett says, or risk being outcasts. ~ Brigid Schulte

My experiences with gender bias are probably the norm. What I found was that expectations of women were simply lower, and this resulted in being overlooked for certain opportunities. ~ Heather Bresch

In 2008, Putin's message was, 'We aren't like a Central Asian republic, we aren't going to build a personalistic regime, we will have institutions.' This is all abolished now. The very idea of a governing party and party career, as you have in China, that didn't work. ~ Ivan Krastev

Before deciding what to do about national space policy, Obama set up an outside review panel of space experts, headed up by my friend Norm Augustine, former head of Lockheed Martin and a former government official. ~ Buzz Aldrin

The norm which the society at large has set today categorically is in the form of preventive measures to be clasped within the purview of its social fabric. The legislators of great economies on the other hand have retrospectively identified the offense, researched, debated and have successfully handed down several yards of legislation with ingrained penalties and punishment for the trespassers of what they think as appropriate, bearing in mind basic human rights of the offenders.
And the sword of Damocles continues to haunt tiny sprouts of the society, ripping their souls and plunging them to misery, despair or death, to which several national and international judicial precedents bear witness. ~ Henrietta Newton Martin Legal Consultant

Welcome to the estrogen vortex, dude, where mindfucks are the norm and understanding them is as common as a fucking unicorn in your front yard. ~ K. Bromberg

Tolkien, then, was a philologist before he was a mythologist, and a mythologist, at least in intention, before he ever became a writer of fantasy fiction. His beliefs about language and about mythology were sometimes original and sometimes extreme, but never irrational, and he was able to express them perfectly clearly. In the end he decided to express them not through abstract argument, but by demonstration, and the success of the demonstration has gone a long way to showing that he did often have a point: especially in his belief, which I share, that a taste for philology, for the history of language in all its forms, names and place-names included, is much more widespread in the population at large than educators and arbiters of taste like to think. In his 1959 'Valedictory Address to the University of Oxford' (reprinted in Essays, pp. 224-40), Tolkien concluded that the problem lay not with the philologists nor with those they taught but with what he called 'misologists' – haters of the word. There would be no harm in them if they simply concluded language study was not for them, out of dullness or ignorance. But what he felt, Tolkien said, was:

"grievance that certain professional persons should suppose their dullness and ignorance to be a human norm; and anger when they have sought to impose the limitation of their minds upon younger minds, dissuading those with philological curiosity from their bent, encouraging those without this interest to believe that ~ Tom Shippey

Pulp Fiction is a, uh, gritty, urban satire. Pump Friction is a uh-uh, a bunch of uh, dudes and ladies having dirty sex. ~ Norm MacDonald

The requirement of conspicuous wastefulness is ... present as a constraining norm selectively shaping and sustaining our sense of what is beautiful. ~ Thorstein Veblen

While arranged marriages are no longer the norm ... ~ Anonymous

Gary Peacock comments, "When we're playing something in straight time, boy! When this thing locks, something else takes over and it's like you're not playing – it's kind of floating!" This level is reached on every track of Standards Live, effortless, as if it is the norm. ~ Ian Carr

The reason it is difficult is that we have been conditioned to laugh at conspiracy theories, and few people will risk public ridicule by advocating them. On the other hand, to endorse the accidental view is absurd. Almost all of history is an unbroken trail of one conspiracy after another. Conspiracies are the norm, not the exception. ~ G. Edward Griffin

While traditionalism can thwart the planners and molders of industry, education, and society in general, fatalism can so stultify a people that passive resignation becomes the approved norm, and acceptance of undesirable conditions becomes the way of life. ~ Jack E. Weller

In the financial world, risk translates to uncertainty. It's measured by "standard deviation from the norm" -- in other words, it's measured by how much the returns swing up and down. Says King, "Most individuals measure risk as their chance of loss, but we measure risk by the variability of returns. ~ Kathy Kristof

I love fashion and am not scared to deviate from the norm. ~ Dascha Polanco

Whoever has power takes over the noun - and the norm - while the less powerful get an adjective. ~ Gloria Steinem

The micro facial expression of contempt when engaging leaders about preparing for their organisation's change is often the norm, matched only by their leadership of change knowledge ~ Peter F Gallagher

Giving importance to what we think because we thought it, taking our own selves not only (to quote the Greek philosopher) as the measure of all things but as their norm or standard, we create in ourselves, if not an interpretation, at least a criticism of the universe, which we don't even know and therefore cannot criticize. The giddiest, most weak-minded of us then promote that criticism to an interpretation that's superimposed, like a hallucination; induced rather than deduced. It's a hallucination in the strict sense, being an illusion based on something only dimly seen. ~ Fernando Pessoa

This is a thing I read by a scientist ... it said scientists now say that a man thinks about sex once every 7.3 seconds. Now, I know what I think every 7.3 seconds. It's just a bunch of meaningless gibberish. ~ Norm MacDonald

Getting calcium from plants might seem a little strange in a society that is so focused on dairy foods as a source of calcium, but some research suggests that even omnivores get as much as 40 percent of their calcium from plant foods. While a strong dairy lobby has convinced many consumers that milk and other dairy foods are essential for a healthy diet, the ability to drink milk into adulthood is not the norm throughout the world. Normal development throughout most of the world involves a gradual loss of the enzyme needed to digest milk sugar after children are weaned from breast milk. We refer to the lack of this enzyme as "lactose intolerance." But that's definitely a western bias since this "intolerance" is not a lack or an abnormality; it's part of normal human development in most people. ~ Jack Norris

Hurricane seasons with four or more super-hurricanes, those with sustained wind speeds of 131 mph or more will soon become the norm. ~ Joseph J. Romm

The culture of the U.S. military is such that human enhancement is accepted as a goal, taking people beyond the norm. There are so many resources going into that kind of research. ~ Jessa Gamble

He showed me that there was another world where strangers helped strangers for no other reason than that it is good to do so, and where callousness was unusual, not the norm. ~ Hyeonseo Lee

Divorce runs high these days, but I'm an exception to the norm. I got divorced when marriage was still popular. ~ Bauvard

Do-it-yourself morality, informed by personal passion rather than old-fogey morality, is the new norm. ~ Anonymous

I fall way beyond the norm on the verb. ~ Method Man

While out on the perimeter, women discovered the freedom of badlands. They were curiously free to invent, without having to liberate themselves from the forms and rewards of the cultural norm. ~ Janet Fitch

I see history as really cyclical in terms of the intense idealism, and the desire to create a better life outside of societal norms. ~ Lauren Groff

Some would say - don't strive for what cannot be achieved. But how do you know what can be achieved without trying?
Nor is it correct to say - Be happy with what you've got.
But should happiness depend on inferiority?


No, to my way of thinking expectations should align with ability. Therefore if one increases the ability to achieve higher goals by determination and perseverance, higher achievements will be the norm.

© 2020, Daniel Kemp All rights reserved. ~ Daniel Kemp

To be told that our child's behavior is "normal" offers little solace when our feelings are badly hurt, or when we worry that hisactions are harmful at the moment or may be injurious to his future. It does not help me as a parent nor lessen my worries when my child drives carelessly, even dangerously, if I am told that this is "normal" behavior for children of his age. I'd much prefer him to deviate from the norm and be a cautious driver! ~ Bruno Bettelheim

Markets are useful instruments for organizing productive activity. But unless we want to let the market rewrite the norms that govern social institutions, we need a public debate about the moral limits of markets. ~ Michael J. Sandel