Social Condemnation Quotes

When Americans really agree that corruption is treason, the traitors will be punished, not legally alone, but as [Benedict] Arnold was, by the insufferable and blasting scorn of his fellow men.

The force of prejudice against marriage between black and white was such that no one would dare to brave it. It is not the legal penalty which is feared but a condemnation a thousand times more terrible.

Callousness and insolence bring to bare unanimous social condemnation, while the simple efforts of politeness are admired; even in those who are otherwise despised.

A society that condemns homosexuality harms itself. (254)

Society, by setting forth clear penalties for certain kinds of conduct sets its public ratification on moral judgments that this is wrong behavior and that it is deserving of punishment irrespective of whether the punishment will deter, rehabilitate or anything else. It is a way of society of defining what is wrong and what is seriously wrong.

This is the thing I've never understood: If someone is going to hell for being gay or being a Jew or a Muslim or having an abortion, then what are you worried about? You don't need to try and convert these people or try and save them. If you really believe in your religion, these people are already doomed, so stop worrying about them.

When Edna O'Brien's first novel, 'The Country Girls,' was published in 1960, her family and neighbors in the small Irish village where she was born tossed copies into a bonfire expressly set for that horrifying purpose.

Such is the remorseless progression of human society, shedding lives and souls as it goes on its way. It is an ocean into which men sink who have been cast out by the law and consigned, with help most cruelly withheld, to moral death. The sea is the pitiless social darkness into which the penal system casts those it has condemned, an unfathomable waste of misery. The human soul, lost in those depths, may become a corpse. Who shall revive it?

Thus I came to condemn capitalism, not through any oppression endured by me personally, but through that very deification of efficiency which capitalism had taught me, for its own purposes.

Anybody who informs on other people is doing something disturbing and even disgusting.

They come together like the Coroner's Inquest, to sit upon the murdered reputations of the week.

Lynching—unlike simple murder—is a form of collective violence in which individuals act with the explicit or implicit support of the community, or at least without its condemnation.

I'm interested in that drive, that rush to judgment, that is so prevalent in our society. We all know that pleasurable rush that comes from condemning, and in the short term it's quite a satisfying thing to do, isn't it?

We do not condemn it because it is a crime, but it is a crime because we condemn it.

In the case of scandal, as in that of robbery, the receiver is always thought as bad as the thief.

Efforts following 9/11 were important. They set a tone. They reminded those who might be tempted to take out their anger on an entire community that such actions were wrong.

....thinking you are attacking society when you condemn or ravage the hypothetical Nice Girl Next Door is the exact equivalent of thinking that stealing from the local supermarket makes you a Communist.

Silence often expresses 'more powerfully than speech the verdict and judgment of society.

We shall therefore compare the concept of homosexuality as heresy, prevalent in the days of the witch-hunts, with the concept of homosexuality as mental illness, prevalent today.