Robert Hass Quotes

I wore a coat and tie all through high school: my way of being rebellious in the late 1950s.

I think that I recall the nostalgic '50s: the start of early television and rock-and-roll, and I think everything seemed to get very generic. Not much has changed.

Growing up in the 1950s, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, boys were supposed to be athletic.

To be a good Briton, a man must trade profitably, marry respectably, live cleanly, avoid excess, revere the established order, and wear his heart in his breeches pocket or anywhere but on his sleeve.

These are the fifties, you know. The disgusting, posturing fifties.

Young people in my generation were sort of in lockstep, and it wasn't just the '40s, either. In the '30s and in the '50s it was the same. No one ever dropped out unless he got sick or got kicked out.

The framework of men's wear is so narrow, that when you play at the edges you get labeled.

To some, the '50s were a decade marked by the banal, the predictable.

We all just kinda did everything we thought we were supposed to do and girls dated the guys they were supposed to and did things with the guys they were supposed to.

A teenage foot that never tapped to 'Heartbreak Hotel' in the '50s probably belonged to a hopeless grind.

My father was the classic Puritan. Hold the emotions in check. Keep up appearances.

But the frat boys were all frivolous and idiotic in our minds now, a bunch of conformist fools going through the motions of hip.

The fact was, by the time she got to high school, being weird and proud of it was an asset. Suddenly cool, Blue could've happily had any number of friends. And she had tried. But the problem with being weird was that everyone else was 'normal'".

Society having ordained certain customs, men are bound to obey the law of society, and conform to its harmless orders.

When people say they do not care what others think of them, for the most part they deceive themselves. Generally they mean only that they will do as they choose, in the confidence that no one will know their vagaries; and at the utmost only that they are willing to act contrary to the opinion of the majority because they are supported by the approval of their neighbours. It is not difficult to be unconventional in the eyes of the world when your unconventionality is but the convention of your set.

Deviants are sacrificed to increase group solidarity

Most men's conscience, habits, and opinions are borrowed from convention and gather continually comforting assurances from the same social consensus that originally suggested them.

A sane person to an insane society must appear insane.

I'm naturally quite conformist, really. If I go to a country and they say, "You've got to drive on the right," I'm not going to drive on the left to show that I'm different. I'm able to stick to the law.

Though it is fairly easy to describe what constitutes a bad home, there is no simple definition of a good one. Conformity with the traditional pattern certainly is no guarantee of the happiest results.

We have had, alas, and still have, the doubtful habit of reverence. Above all, we respect things as they are.

Those who have mastered etiquette, who are entirely, impeccably right, would seem to arrive at a point of exquisite dullness.

The customs and practices of life in society sweep us along.

It is not difficult to be unconventional in the eyes of the world when your unconventionality is but the convention of your set.

We have all got to exert ourselves a little to keep sane, and call things by the same names as other people call them by.