societal customs Quotes

When mores are sufficient, laws are unnecessary. When mores are insufficient, laws are unenforceable.

Culture is a product of law. And laws create norms for society. This is why anyone who wants to change the culture of a country must try to change the norms of the country.

The cultural influences in our country are like the floo floo bird. I am referring to the peculiar and especial bird who always flew backward. To keep the wind out of its eyes? No. Just because it didn't give a darn where it was going, but just had to see where it had been.

Conventions are often more cruel than the law.

I do not think that I was brought up in a unique society with unique features about giving.

... anybody is as their land and air is. Anybody is as the sky is low or high, the air heavy or clear and anybody is as there is wind or no wind there. It is that which makes them and the arts they make and the work they do and the way they eat and the way they drink and the way they learn and everything.

Humans become human through intense learning not just of survival skills but of customs and social mores, kinship and social laws-that is, culture.

I know of no culture in the world at present or any time in the past that has not been heavily involved with one or more psychoactive substances.

People who describe culture and values and how people behave - I've heard people refer to it as 'the soft stuff'-they often underestimate its importance. The soft stuff actually is the hard stuff.

Ornaments were invented by modesty.

Have you ever thought about why, all over the world, in every culture, in every society, there are a few days in the year for celebration? These few days for celebration are just a compensation - because these societies have taken away all celebration in your life, and if nothing is given to you in compensation, your life can become a danger to the culture. Every culture has to give some compensation to you so that you don't feel completely lost in misery, in sadness. But these compensations are false.

History is the enactment of ritual on a permanent and universal stage; and its perpetual commemoration.

If you want to find out what it means to have a society without any rituals, read the New York Times.

Out of every hundred new ideas ninety-nine or more will probably be inferior to the traditional responses which they propose to replace. No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for those are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history.

Every society by its own practice of living and by the mode of relatedness, of feelings, and perceiving, develops a system of categories which determines the forms of awareness.

It's clear all the way through history that practices are primary and beliefs are secondary.

Custom is the great leveller. It corrects the inequality of fortune by lessening equally the pleasures of the prince and the pains of the peasant.