Internalized Norms Quotes

The message of body acceptance built on Jennifer Lawrence's soundbites only empowers those who are willing to ignore the fact that her statements reinforce our current cultural views rather than subverting them.

I think most of us are raised with preconceived notions of the choices we're supposed to make.

The resistance is the voice in your head telling you to use bullets in your PowerPoint slides...It’s the voice that tells you to leave controversial ideas out of the paper you’re writing, because the teacher won’t like them. The resistance pushes relentlessly for you to fit in.

'The New York Times' is inherent in what we are, but not worn as 'what we are'; it's important and crucial to all of us, but not something that was drilled in, in any specific ways.

I think that women are raised to believe that they're supposed to want certain things, and so you feel like you're supposed to apologize when you don't want those things.

Tiny slices, no frosting, forty-five minutes on the StairMaster: These are the conditions, variations on a theme of vigilance and self-restraint that I've watched women dance to all my life, that I've danced to myself instinctively and still have to work to resist.

People without an internalized symbolic system can all too easily become captives of the media.

Man can seldom - very, very, seldom - fight a winning fight against his training; the odds are too heavy.

And I don't have to listen to a sermon to know what to think or feel about them. It's almost as if I absorbed completely what mattered most to me, and the rest could go.

Ill writers are usually the sharpest censors.

Everyone represses everything. Do you think any of these "normal" human beings really do exactly what they want to do all the time? 'Course not. It's just the same. We're middle-class and we're British. Repression is in our veins.

We are so well trained that we are our own domesticator. We are an autodomesticated animal. We can now domesticate ourselves according to the same belief system we were given, and using the same system of punishment and reward. We punish ourselves when we don't follow the rules according to our belief system; we reward ourselves when we are the "good boy" or "good girl".

I was raised a Catholic, so I can even feel a little, you know, embarrassed or guilty if I'm really offending people's sensibilities. To a degree.

My childhood beliefs became so much a part of me that even today I find myself automatically living by a personal standard of conduct which can only be explained as resulting from my religious training.

When someone thinks of the term, 'pretty girl,' they don't typically think of someone who looks like me.

Forward steps are made by giving up old armor because words are built into you - in the soft typewriter of the womb you do not realize the word-armor you carry; for example, when you read this page your eyes move irresistibly from left to right following the words that you have been accustomed to.

It was me that was holding myself back because I felt like I had to fit into this mold of what people want to see.