Societal Expectations Quotes

It occurred to him that his scarcely perceptible attempts to struggle against what was considered good by the most highly placed people, those scarcely noticeable impulses which he had immediately suppressed, might have been the real thing, and all the rest false. ~ Leo Tolstoy

How do you judge the professionals you patronize? Too many people judge them by display factors. Extra points are given to those who wear expensive clothes, drive luxury automobiles, and live in exclusive neighborhoods. They assume a professional is likely to be mediocre, even incompetent, if he lives in a modest home and drives a three-year-old Ford Crown Victoria. Very, very few people judge the quality of the professionals they use by net worth criteria. Many professionals have told us they must look successful to convince their customers/clients that they are. ~ Thomas J. Stanley

One must conform to the baseness of an age or become neurotic. ~ Robert Musil

I am consumed, or I have been consumed, with these issues of motherhood and the way we act out societal expectations and roles. So both my nonfiction and my fiction have been pretty much exclusively about that. ~ Ayelet Waldman

Educating Lawyers succeeds admirably in describing the educational programs at virtually every American law school. The call for the integration of the three apprenticeships seems to me exactly what is needed to make legal education more professional, to prepare law students better for the practice of law, and to address societal expectations of lawyers. ~ Stephen Wizner

No one has the right to demand that your body be something other than what it is. ~ Agnostic Zetetic

Perhaps some of the appeal of the dangerous-but-yummy paranormal anti-hero lies in his scorn for societal expectations. Yes, women have come a long way, but there are still some cultural stigmas more associated with women than men. ~ Jeaniene Frost

You may have what it takes to be successful, but if you lose yourself in someone else's priorities or societal expectations, you will be judged not by your potential but rather by your history ~ Lois P Frankel

And that's the crucial element of life experience that so many of us avoid, you know. Trying something new, taking that single leap of faith into the utterly and absolutely unknown. Into the different. Those who take that leap are the ones who challenge whatever fate they might otherwise have. They fly in the face of societal expectations, determining for themselves who and what they will be and not allowing the bonds of birth, class, and bias to make that determination for them. ~ Elizabeth George

All of us, whether vivisector or vegan, have been subject to mechanisms undercutting sympathy for animals. How long and to what extent we submit to these mechanisms is not a matter of rationality: to cut off our feelings and support animal exploitation is rational, given societal expectations and sanctions; but to assert our feelings and oppose animal exploitation is also rational, given the pain involved in losing our natural bonds with animals. So our task is not to pass judgment on others' rationality, but to speak honestly of the loneliness and isolation of anthropocentric society, and of the damage done to every person expected to hurt animals. ~ Brian Luke

Once upon a time there was a boy who knew what he was going to be from the very moment he was born. As soon as he was able to talk, he told everyone, I am a builder of dreams. No one in his family had any idea what that meant, except maybe his Aunt Dorothy, who knew about dreams & how they form you into the thing you're going to be, even when you think you have other plans.

The rest of his family did things like work with numbers & fix old cars & bake bread in a bakery. When he first told them what he was going to be, they thought it was cute & then, when it didn't stop, it was something not to be mentioned at family gatherings & finally, it was something that would lead to personal suffering if he didn't start getting his head on straight, by god. So, he stopped saying it out loud, but he never forgot & when he got older, he moved away & his family told the neighbors he was working as a manager & every one nodded & was pleased that he'd finally come around to viewing life as it was & not how you wish it would be.

But he didn't really care because he was building things of air & sunlight & the laughter of children & the sharp smell of lighter fluid at a summer barbecue & the flash of color on the throat of a hummingbird & all of them were things that had no real name, but people felt them all the same. They felt them all the same... ~ Brian Andreas

Greenhouse gas emissions and global warming are among humanity's most pressing concerns. Societal expectations on climate change are real, and our industry is expected to take a leadership role. ~ Ali Al-Naimi

Girlhood ... is the intellectual phase of a woman's life, that time when, unencumbered by societal expectations or hormonal rages, one may pursue any curiosity from the mysteries of the yo-yo to the meaning of infinity. These two particular pursuits were where I left off in the fifth grade when I discovered a hair growing in the wrong place and all hell broke loose. ~ Alice Kahn

There was a second dinner scheduled for the following night, and I was dreading the disapproving glances by these women who had never worked a day in their lives. I was still a woman, and I still cared what I looked like; no matter what I accomplished with my career, nothing eliminates those stinging insecurities you develop as a child or teen. ~ Lynsey Addario

Liberating ourselves from the traditional strictures of marriage altogether, and/or transforming those strictures to include all of us -- gay, feminist, career-focused, baby crazy, monogamous, non-monogamous, skeptical, romantic, and everyone in between -- is the challenge facing this generation. As we consciously opt out or creatively reimagine marriage one loving couple at a time, we'll be able to shift societal expectations wholesale, freeing younger generations from some of the antiquated assumptions we've faced (that women always want to get married and men always shy away from commitment, that gender parity somehow disempowers men, that turning 30 makes an unmarried woman into an old maid). ~ Courtney E. Martin

The girl with a moustache" they called me every now and then
"It's about time you wax your arms" those who "cared" said
I faced the fears of the dreaded thread on my face
To succumb every other week to the world's ways ~ Sanhita Baruah

Issues arise not from expecting too much from people, but too little. ~ Robert J. Braathe

I don't like to do what people expect. Why should I live up to their expectations instead of my own? ~ David Levithan

I lied to Father . . . to spare him. I broke our family rule: better to hurt with the truth than comfort with a lie. I woke up today with a list of his expectations and I'm tiring of it. ~ Michael Ben Zehabe

In my life nothing goes wrong. When things seem to not meet my expectations, I let go of how I think things should be. It's a matter of not having any attachment to any fixed outcome. ~ Deepak Chopra

There are just so many options that people have. But as a writer, you'll drive yourself crazy, if you worry about that too much. People watch a lot of TV, so they think certain things are going to happen, and you're always trying to subvert expectations. ~ Carlton Cuse

Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts. I was better after I had cried, than before
more sorry, more aware of my own ingratitude, more gentle. ~ Charles Dickens

So learn one thing, that to expect is bad and that the world is not here to fulfill your expectations. ~ Osho

Some people get married because of what they hope to receive, rather than what they want to give. This is a recipe for disaster. ~ Wayne Gerard Trotman

Why is it that when a woman has bruises, especially on her face, people assume they were put there through domestic violence? I'm guilty of jumping to the same conclusions myself. It's a societal assumption, unfortunately born out of too frequent reality. ~ Kim Holden

Unfortunately we often get praise for things that weren't particularly difficult to achieve. If we focus on the props and encouragement of those who have low expectations for us, we become mediocre. It can be challenging to set our sights on excellence, particularly when we're hearing that we're already there. One of life's greatest lessons, which we all must learn, could be expressed in the phrase "That was nothing. Watch this." Challenge yourself and others to call the normal things normal and save that word excellent for things that really are. ~ Alex Harris

God honors and blesses people of action beyond expectations. ~ Sunday Adelaja

In all sectors of society there should be roughly equal prospects of culture and achievement for everyone similarly motivated and endowed. The expectations of those with the same abilities and aspirations should not be affected by their social class. ~ John Rawls

Our perception of yesterday is the foundation for our expectations of tomorrow. ~ Gene Simmons

A woman's hopes are woven of sunbeams; a shadow annihilates them. ~ George Eliot

The easiest way to maintain happiness is to lower your expectations of other people and raise them of yourself! ~ Garrison Wynn

As Paul Saffo, a forecaster of large-scale change at Discern Analytics, observes wisely, 'Change is never linear. Our expectations are linear, but new technologies come in S curves, so we routinely overestimate short-term change and underestimate long-term change.' Never mistake a clear view for a short distance, he adds. ~ Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran

Any time you sign a big contract, you get in those later years, the expectations are high to play at a high level. ~ Johnathan Joseph

If expectations of lifetime earnings drop, then so will spending. ~ Amity Shlaes

Shame is deeply rooted in identity. And the "self-ideal" we create for ourselves can often incorporate a lot of expectations that simply aren't included in God's ideal for us. ~ Matt Chandler

Emotion clouds the rational, and many perspectives guide the full reality. To view current events as a historian is to account for all perspectives, even those of your enemy. It is to know the past and to use such relevant history as a template for expectations. It is, most of all, to force reason ahead of instinct, to refuse to demonize that which you hate, and to, most of all, accept your own fallibility. ~ R.A. Salvatore

expectations), design changes to increase pay perceptions are fairly limited, putting even more of the burden on increasing pay perceptions ~ Anonymous

No, you're not going to get away from us, and you're not going to be different, you're going to be the same as you've always been; with doubts, ever lasting dissatisfaction with yourself, vain efforts to improve, and failures, and continual expectations of happiness that has eluded you and that isn't possible for you. ~ Leo Tolstoy

Those books made it crystal clear that giving honey to your baby before he was a year old made you a terrible mother. The moment a spoon of honey would touch his lips, the words "Awful Mother" would appear on your forehead, forever branding you as a parenting failure. ~ Ilona Andrews

If relationships were hard, mariage was even harder ... it seemed like most couples struggled. It went with the territory. What did Nana always say? Stick two different people with two different sets of expectations under one roof and it ain't always going to be shrimp and grits on Easter. ~ Nicholas Sparks

I would like to do more dramas when I find a good role that will allow me to politely upset people's expectations of me as a comic actor. ~ Ben Stiller

Soon our culture's oldest dreams will be made real. Even the thought of sending a kind of flying craft to the moon is no longer nothing more than a child's fantasy. At this moment in the cities below us, the first mechanical men are being constructed that will have the capability to pilot the ship on its maiden voyage. But no one has asked if this dream we've had for so long will lose its value once it's realized. What will happen when those mechanical men step out of their ship and onto the surface of this moon, which has served humanity for thousands of years as our principal icon of love and madness? When they touch their hands to the ground and perform their relentless analyses and find no measurable miracles, but a dead gray world of rocks and dust? When they discover that it was the strength of millions of boyhood daydreams that kept the moon aloft, and that without them that murdered world will fall, spiraling slowly down and crashing into the open sea? ~ Dexter Palmer

We all think we're going to be great and we feel a little bit robbed when our expectations aren't met. But sometimes our expectations sell us short. Sometimes the expected simply pales in comparison to the unexpected. You got to wonder why we cling to our expectations, because the expected is just what keeps us steady. Standing. Still. The expected's just the beginning, the unexpected is what changes our lives. ~ Shonda Rhimes

Expectations are the shackles that will not permit something to be what it actually is. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

The friendliness and charity of our countrymen can always be relied upon to relieve their fellow citizens in misfortune. ~ Grover Cleveland

Obama sees himself as such a huge change that he can be cautious about other societal changes. But what he doesn't realize is that legalizing gay marriage is like electing a black president. Before you do it, it seems inconceivable. Once it's done, you can't remember what all the fuss was about. ~ Maureen Dowd