Peter L. Berger Quotes

Society is one vast conspiracy for carving one into the kind of statue likes, and then placing it in the most convenient niche it has.

Conformity may not always reign in the prosperous bourgeois suburb, but it ultimately always governs.

We arrange our lives-even the best and boldest men and women that exist, just as much as the most limited-with reference to what society conventionally rules and makes right.

Often we don't notice the stringent rules to which our culture subjects us.

Society has taught us to suppress certain things and not do certain things.

The whole system of society tells you what to do.

Good taste, the last and vilest of human superstitions, has succeeded in silencing us where all the rest have failed.

One of the unpardonable sins, in the eyes of most people, is for a man to go about unlabeled. The world regards such a person as the police do an unmuzzled dog, not under proper control.

That all men are alike is exactly what society would like to hear. It considers actual or imagined differences as stigmas indicating that not enough has yet been done; that something has still been left outside its machinery, not quite determined by its totality.

The judges of normality are present everywhere. We are in the society of the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the social worker-judge.

We want the children to conform; we want to control their minds, to shape their conduct, their way of living, so that they will fit into the pattern of society, That is what every parent wants, is it not? And that is exactly what is happening, whether it be in America or in Europe, in Russia or in India. The pattern may vary slightly, but they all want the child to conform.

One of the methods of manipulation is to inoculate individuals with the bourgeois appetite for personal success.

Certainly in each social period, youth must be made to venerate the dominant absurdities.

Assent - and you are sane - Demur - and you're straightaway dangerous - and handled with a chain.

The North American system only wants to consider the positive aspects of reality. Men and women are subjected from childhood to an inexorable process of adaptation certain principles, contained in brief formulas are endlessly repeated by the Press, the radio, the churches, and the schools, and by those kindly, sinister beings, the North American mothers and wives. A person imprisoned by these schemes is like a plant in a flowerpot too small for it he cannot grow or mature.

because everybody lies. It's part of living in society .

The range of socially permissible and desirable satisfaction is greatly enlarged, but through this satisfaction, the Pleasure Principle is reduced deprived of the claims which are irreconcilable with the established society. Pleasure, thus adjusted, generates submission.

The whole intelectual culture has a filtering system, starts as a child in school. You're expected to accept certain beliefs, styles, behavioral patterns and so on. If you don't accept them, you are called maybe a behavioral problem, or something, and you're weeded out. Something like that goes on all the way through universities and graduate schools. There is an implicit system of filtering, which has the, it creates a strong tendency to impose conformism. Now, it's a tendency, so you do have exceptions, and sometimes the exceptions are quite striking.

That it really began in the days when the Love Laws were made. The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much.

It's mind control, see. You have to go to school, get those exams, get to university or college, get a job, get married, don't miss the boat, do it now or you'll shoot your life down the drain. Yeah. They got you as soon as you were born. They never risked a second of your life. When you have kids they'll be telling them they have to wear a plastic mask and put a penny in the slot about their nose before they can breathe in.

All kinds of frankness and honesty are terrible crimes in the eyes of society.

Preventing the new generation from changing in any deep way is what most societies require of their educators.

Such figures as Boy George do not disturb me nearly so much as do those relentlessly hetero (sexual?) keepers of the keys and seals, those who know what the world needs in the way of order and who are ready and willing to supply that order.

Custom determines what is agreeable.

Most of a modest woman's life was spent, after all, in denying what, in one day at least of every year, was made obvious.