Societal Norm Quotes

By characterizing the use of illegal drugs as quasi-legal, state-sanctioned, Saturday afternoon fun, legalizers destabilize the societal norm that drug use is dangerous. They undercut the goals of stopping the initiation of drug use to prevent addiction ... Children entering drug abuse treatment routinely report that they heard that 'pot is medicine' and, therefore, believed it to be good for them. ~ Andrea Barthwell

Most often we call a person intelligent when they learn to conform to the societal norm. Are they wise? ~ Debasish Mridha

Anomaly is when you don't fit the expected norm. Like "wait what is this?! It doesn't belong here." Its what the system never planned for but now has to adapt to. Its Neo in The Matrix. ~ LeCrae

Nobody lives up to the norms that God had in mind when he first created human beings. ~ John Ortberg

My job as artistic director at the Brighton digital agency Lighthouse is all about trying to show that digital culture is about more than just tools and gadgets - it's about perceiving the societal transformations being brought about by technology. ~ Honor Harger

The solution is to gradually become free of societal rewards and learn how to substitute for them rewards that are under one's own powers. ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Every generation has someone who steps outside the norm and offers a voice for the unspeakable attitudes of that time. I represent everything that's supposed to be wrong, everything that's forbidden. ~ Sam Kinison

The more people anticipate the elimination of suffering the less strength they have actually to oppose it. Whoever deals with his personal suffering only in the way our society has taught him - through illusion, minimization, suppression, apathy - will deal with societal suffering in the same way. ~ Dorothee Solle

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

I have a great need to learn what the norm is by dealing with what is not the norm ... with the grotesque and the fantastic. ~ Alfred Brendel

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

to the psychologist Robert Cialdini, people can capitalize on this norm of reciprocity by giving what they want to receive. Instead ~ Adam M. Grant

Chastity is oftener owing to diffidence and shame, than to fortitude of reason or virtue. ~ Norm MacDonald

I don't like sports where it's like, you watch a guy on a motorcycle flip or something, then another guy does it, it looks exactly the same, and then at the end one guy gets higher points! It seems so arbitrary; I don't know who's ahead ever. ~ Norm MacDonald

And for all the progress, there is still societal pressure for women to keep an eye on marriage from a young age. When I went to college, as much as my parents emphasized academic achievement, they emphasized marriage even more. They told me that the most eligible women marry young to get a "good man" before they are all taken. I followed their advice and throughout college, I vetted every date as a potential husband (which, trust me, is a sure way to ruin a date at age nineteen). ~ Sheryl Sandberg

In giving advice, aptitude is often less to be considered, than seasonableness. ~ Norm MacDonald

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

Am I a prisoner of my thoughts?
Am I a prisoner of my societal conformity?
Who am I?
How conscious am I?
Am I conscious or obnoxious? ~ Debasish Mridha

International stability is never a given. It is never the norm. When achieved, it is the product of self-conscious action by the great powers, and most particularly of the greatest power, which now and for the foreseeable future is the United States. If America wants stability, it will have to create it. ~ Charles Krauthammer

As we're about to see, by striving for even greater genetic perfection we might be eliminating a lot more than just millions of people who don't fit the societal norms we've created. We might actually be eradicating the very solutions to the medical problems we're working so hard to solve. ~ Sharon Moalem

Who in the world wants to run a country where the new norm is one where there are no jobs? ~ Rush Limbaugh

When the congregation becomes the norm by which sermons are measured, a minister has put a mortgage on his soul. ~ Ralph W. Sockman

We all have to lead our own life, and we only have the one life, and the only people who can live life not according to their own desires are those who have no desires
which is the majority, actually. People can say what they like, they can speak of abnegation, sacrifice, generosity, acceptance, and resignation, but it's all false. The norm is for people to think that they desire whatever comes to them, whatever they achieve along the way or whatever is given to them
they have no preconceived desires. ~ Javier Marias

To conquer nature is, in effect, to remove all natural barriers and human norms and to substitute artificial, fabricated equivalents for natural processes. ~ Alex Campbell

Group projects are the exception in school, but they should be the norm. ~ Seth Godin

Staying, we all know, is not the norm in our mobile culture. A great deal of money is spent each day to create desires in each of us that can never be fulfilled. I suspect that much of our restlessness is a return on this investment. ~ Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

You marry out of free will. If I marry, it will be from a personal choice, not some social compulsion or norm. ~ Sonam Kapoor

Melanin is the black pigment which permits skins to appear other than white (black, brown, red and yellow). Melanin pigment coloration is the norm for the hue-man family. If there are non-white readers who disagree with this presentation of white rejection of the white-skinned self, may I refer you to the literature on the currently developing sun-tanning parlors. ~ Frances Cress Welsing

The tribalizing power of the new electronic media, the way in which they return to us to the unified fields of the old oral cultures, to tribal cohesion and pre-individualist patterns of thought, is little understood. Tribalism is the sense of the deep bond of family, the closed society as the norm of community. ~ Marshall McLuhan

I never do impressions, but I probably should. People like that stuff. ~ Norm MacDonald

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

I refuse to believe that clubbing is how people are supposed to meet to establish relationships on a level for beyond what we consider to be a norm in modern society. ~ Jon Richardson

One cannot understand a political "system" detached from its societal context ~ Andrew J. Robinson

When the solution to a given problem doesn't lay right before our eyes, it is easy to assume that no solution exists. But history has shown again and again that such assumptions are wrong. This is not to say the world is perfect. Nor that all progress is always good. Even widespread societal gains inevitably produce losses for some people. That's why the economist Joseph Schumpeter referred to capitalism as "creative destruction." But humankind has a great capacity for finding technological solutions to seemingly intractable problems, and this will likely be the case for global warming. It isn't that the problem isn't potentially large. It's just that human ingenuity - when given proper incentives - is bound to be larger. Even more encouraging, technological fixes are often far simpler, and therefore cheaper, than the doomsayers could have imagined. Indeed, in the final chapter of this book we'll meet a band of renegade engineers who have developed not one but three global-warming fixes, any of which could be bought for less than the annual sales tally of all the Thoroughbred horses at Keeneland auction house in Kentucky. ~ Steven D. Levitt

She supposed it must always be this way; once the unthinkable settles into being the norm you become numb to it. She never wanted to be that numb. ~ Neal Shusterman

Within our core self is an indelible blueprint of unrivaled individuality - the singular being that each of us exists to express. In this three-dimensional movie called "Life" there are no stand-ins, body doubles, or understudies - no one can fill in for us by proxy! Realization of this truth alone eliminates the need to imitate, conform, limit, or betray our loyalty to the originality of Self. Imagine the relief of removing your carefully crafted masks fashioned by societal forms of conditioning and instead responding to what comes into your experience directly from your Authentic Self. One of the first principles to honor in your relationship with yourself is to respect and trust your own inner voice. This form of trust is the way of the heart, the epitome of well-being. ~ Michael Bernard Beckwith

An education program is, by definition, a societal program. Work should be done at school, rather than at home. ~ Francois Hollande

Every new form of communication brings with it a perennial angst about what it is doing to our brains. We are not the first to feel that everything is changing too quickly around us, and we won't be the last. Throughout history, communication technologies have been catalysts of societal and cultural change that upset the status quo. ~ Alfred Hermida

Jack was the kind of guy you could take into any situation and he would figure out how to fit in. Wayne, not so much. So they didn't really ever bond."
"You know what we therapists say about people who fit in in every situation?"
"What?"
"They have no inherent genuine personality. They aren't themselves, they are only who they think the current audience expects them to be. Flawed though some of Wayne's actions may seem to you, at the end of the day he sounds like someone who isn't afraid to just be himself, all day, every day. That takes a fairly strong sense of self, to not go against your natural instincts, to not try to make yourself into something you aren't in order to be better liked or more homogenous."
"I never thought about it that way."
"Most people don't. But if you look at some of the truly great minds and artists of our history, they are often people who didn't necessarily fit, who were outside the norm. Some of them had actual disorders, many of the great minds are now presumed to have some level of Asperger's or low-level autistic tendencies, but a lot of them were just left of center."
"Are you saying that Wayne is a secret genius? Do I have a Jobs or Spielberg or something on my hands?"
"Of course not. I'm just saying that fitting in, or caring about fitting in, isn't necessarily in and of itself the world's most desirable trait. ~ Stacey Ballis

And of course you are mad, if by a madman we mean a mind that questions and rejects every civilized norm. ~ Stephen Fry

Machineries of reason, machineries of conduct, machineries of virtue. The machine that regulates instinct, keeps one's hands free of another man's throat, free of one's own. These machines have all, as someone said, gone too long in the elements. Gummed now, rusted, bloodless.
I forget who said it and I no longer care. ~ Ben Marcus

A culture is like an immune system. It operates through the laws of systems, just like a body. If a body has an infection, the immune system deals with it. Similarly, a group enforces its norms, either actively or passively. ~ Henry Cloud

I'm sorry," Leo murmured and then seemed to look through Martin for a few seconds before he returned his gaze to him. "Although if it's any comfort - and please don't take this the wrong way, because I speak from my own perspective, which I understand often places me far outside of the norm - I sometimes like to think that death, at least in the case of those we truly love, allows us to appreciate what they have done for us in ways that are not possible when we're all here, constantly changing and fixated on how to get from one day to the next. Death offers us the chance to reflect on who they were, which of course is a way to understand ourselves. As painful as it can be to see them go - and I don't mean to diminish the sense of loss or grief we all feel - there is also no greater gift. ~ Matthew Gallaway