Laws matter. With effective implementation and enforcement, good laws can nudge forward positive changes in social and cultural mores.
How terribly downright must be the utterances of storms and earthquakes to those accustomed to the soft hypocrisies of society.
People who had been treated inhumanly, not given a chance to secure any foot on any ladder - and all the social mores were suddenly abandoned.
Nothing more rapidly inclines a person to go into a monastery than reading a book on etiquette. There are so many trivial ways in which it is possible to commit some social sin.
Civilization largely consists in hiding human nature. When the barbarian learns to hide it we account him enlightened.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910
In all highly civilised communities Pretence is prominent, and sooner or later invades the regions of Literature.
I begin to grow heartily tired of the etiquette and nonsense so fashionable in this city.
Humans become human through intense learning not just of survival skills but of customs and social mores, kinship and social laws-that is, culture.
Advertising reflects the mores of society, but it does not influence them.
Freedom sees in religion the companion of its struggles and its triumphs, the cradle of its infancy, the divine source of its rights. It considers religion as the safeguard of mores; and mores as the guarantee of laws and the pledge of its duration.
Don't ever take a seven-year-old with you to a campaign dinner - they will embarrass you no end.
In 1930s mysteries, all sorts of motives were credible which aren't credible today, especially motives of preventing guilty sexual secrets from coming out. Nowadays, people sell their guilty sexual secrets.
Yes, but also one of the problems for a novelist in Ireland is the fact that there are no formal manners. I mean some people have beautiful manners but there's no kind of agreed form of manners.
As a novelist, you write about social mores, but not everything can be explained.
The end of secrecy would be the end of the novel - especially the English novel. The English novel requires social secrecy, personal secrecy.
I wanted to do something in the style of a comedy of manners.
Socially, Philadelphia was still a fairly provincial city, its business community governed by the mores of the Main Line. Politically, it was a cauldron of ethnic rivalries, dominated by competing Irish and Italian constituencies.
