D. H. Lawrence Quotes

I think we are affected by others in all kinds of ways. I do understand what it's like to wish to control the conditions under which we can be affected by other human beings, but none of us really are.

It is society which, fashioning us in its image, fills us with religious, political, and moral beliefs that control our actions.

Sexuality is the great field of battle between biology and society.

Most conduct is guided by norms rather than by laws. Norms are voluntary and are effective because they are enforced by peer pressure.

A social fact is every way of acting, fixed or not, capable of exercising on the individual an external constraint; or again, every way of acting which is general throughout a given society, while at the same time existing in its own right independent of its individual manifestations.

It is essential that we realize once and for all that man is much more of a sex creature than a moral creature. The former is inherent, the other is grafted on.

No written law has ever been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.

People are going to behave however the social norms permit, and beyond that.

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.

The creative process taps into our deepest subconscious, and we are each of us sex-crazed - products of a shame-based Judeo-Christian culture that has irrevocably warped us all to varying degrees.

What people will - or will not - laugh at is mainly determined by their social conditioning.

Even what people take to be their most personal desires are usually programmed by the imagined order.

People aren't autonomous creatures. They're under a lot of pressure themselves.

Society will be obeyed; if you refuse obedience, you must take the consequences. Society has only one law, and that is custom. Even religion itself is socially powerful only just so far as it has custom on its side.

Society becomes how you behave.

Just always be extremely respectful, was something that was drilled into me, which I think probably prevented me from having sex for a good seven years longer than it should have.

What is human behavior, except trying to prove that we're not animals?

I think sociologists are among the best at thinking about emergence, of thinking about the ways that the society is more than the sum of the individuals. And I've found that much of the wisest writing on human social nature comes from sociology and anthropology, not from my own field of social psychology.

The easiest way to get brainwashed is to be born. All of the above principles then immediately go into action, a process which social psychologists euphemistically call socialization.

Our historical experience teaches us that men imitate one another, that their attitudes are statistically calculable, their opinions manipulable, and that man is therefore less an individual (a subject) than an element in a mass.

If the culture is so all pervasive that you can’t think outside of it, how are you making genuine choices?

We are all victims of culture.

The new human type cannot be properly understood without awareness of what he is continuously exposed to from the world of things about him, even in his most secret innervations.

Money and sex are forces too unruly for our reason; they can only be controlled by taboos with which we tamper at our peril.

Everybody sacrifices something in an attempt to reach what they think society wants.