Outdated Values Quotes

… the idiocy of rural life

I'm always making Butcher Holler sound like the most backward part of the United States-and I think maybe it is.

You know when people start talking about freedom they have to be old. They gotta be old-fashioned and really out of touch. Freedom? Well, what's that? Who needs any of that?

Sunnybrook Farm is now a parking lot; the petticoats are in the garbage can, where they belong in the modern world; and I detest censorship.

That prudery which survives youth and beauty resembles a scarecrow left in the fields after harvest.

...I had grown up in a world that was dominated by immature age. Not by vigorous immaturity, but by immaturity that was old and tired and prudent, that loved ritual and rubric, and was utterly wanting in curiosity about the new and the strange. Its era has passed away, and the world it made has crumbled around us. Its finest creation, a code of manners, has been ridiculed and discarded.

I grow tired of 18th century moralities in a 20th century space-atomic age

The sage belongs to the same obsolete repertory as the virtuous maiden and the enlightened monarch.

Dignity is an anachronism.

What consoles one nowadays is not repentance but pleasure. Repentance is quite out of date.

Sometimes one gets the feeling that life still thinks it's living in Paris in the '30s.

Washington is a city of locker-room boys, and all the old, outmoded notions apply: men and women are ushered to separate rooms after dinner, sex is dirty, and they are still serving onion-soup dip.

You have many fine qualities that I admire. But you are out of time. You should have been born a century ago, when values such as yours meant something.

There can be no place in a 21st-century parliament for people with 15th-century titles upholding 19th-century prejudices.

It is always self-defeating to pretend to a generation younger than your own; it simply erases your own experience in history.

The lives of people are like young trees in a forest. They are being choked by climbing vines. The vines are old thoughts and beliefs planted by dead men.

Sometimes I think the family I was brought up in was 100 years out of date.