Quotes & Sayings About Cultural Norms

Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The relation is roughly that of courage to war.
The human beauty we're talking about here is beauty of a particular type; it might be called kinetic beauty. Its power and appeal are universal. It has nothing to do with sex or cultural norms. What it seems to have to do with, really, is human beings' reconciliation with the fact of having a body. — David Foster Wallace

One might object that belly dancing originates in a culture which is foreign to the West and therefore unsuited to Western women, yet this is precisely what makes it an even more enriching experience, apart from the fact that it is perfectly suited to the female body. By experiencing unfamiliar movements, a woman can allow her body to break through cultural norms. — Rosina-Fawzia Al-Rawi

How can you respect a religion that forces women into polygamous marriages, mutilates their genitals, forbids them to drive cars and subjects them to the humiliation of 'instant' divorce? In fact, none of these practices are Islamic at all. Anyone wishing to understand Islam must first separate the religion from the cultural norms and style of a society. — Ruqaiyyah Waris Maqsood

As Dr. Hamid Rashid, the senior Bangladeshi economist and a leader of the UNDP's Legal Empowerment of the Poor program, has flatly stated: "With limited and insecure land rights, it is difficult, if not impossible, for the poor to overcome poverty."80 And once again, it is the women in the developing world who are most devastated by the lawless chaos of insecure property rights. In the absence of clear and documented legal rights to property, there are two other social forces that step into the vacuum and settle who gets what: 1) brute force, and 2) traditional cultural norms. And under both influences women generally lose - and brutally so. — Gary A. Haugen

Cost overruns are not uncommon in architecture, particularly for designs that depart from structural or technological norms, or demand a finer quality of execution than commercial schemes - conditions typical of buildings for cultural institutions. Budgets are exceeded for many reasons, not all of them within an architect's control. — Martin Filler

if we seek to follow Jesus, we must be passers-by of many things around us: we should keep alert, we should discern where we are, we ought at times to avoid and not touch; we shouldn't condemn, but neither should we be duped or gullible or willing to buy the latest cultural dope on offer; we should just move along, behaving circumspectly and speaking up when necessary - boldly, charitably, humbly - and hope that our dissimilarity from many societal norms will testify to others that there exists a better, more peaceable, more loving way to live. — Addison Hodges Hart

If our moral attitudes are entirely the result of nonrational factors, such as gut feelings and the absorption of cultural norms, they should either be stable or randomly drift over time, like skirt lengths or the widths of ties. They shouldn't show systematic change over human history. But they do. — Paul Bloom

Over the last three centuries our historical reception of folk and fairy tales has been so negatively twisted by aesthetic norms, educational standards and market conditions that we can no longer distinguish folk tales from fairy tales nor recognize that the impact of these narratives stems from their imaginative grasp and symbolic depiction of social realities. Folk and fairy tales are generally confused with one another and taken as make-believe stories with no direct reference to a particular community or historical tradition. Their own specific ideology and aesthetics are rarely seen in the light of a diachronic historical development which has great bearing on our cultural self-understanding. — Jack D. Zipes

It is a function of entrenched, intergenerational poverty that isolates too many lower-income Americans from even middle-class economic, cultural, and social opportunities and norms. — Yuval Levin

While rationalism at the individual level is a plea for more personal autonomy from cultural norms, at the social level it is often a claim- or arrogation- of power to stifle the autonomy of others. — Thomas Sowell

Most people don't question the practice of eating meat. Many of these people care about animals and the environment, some deeply. But for some reason-force of habit, cultural norms, resistance to change-there is a fundamental disconnect whereby these feelings don't translate into changes of behavior. — Brian Greene

Out-marriage is an issue religious groups have been wrestling with for some time. Of course men and women fall in love. Of course it's not always convenient to their respective cultural and spiritual norms. — G. Willow Wilson

You can go into neighborhoods in the United States where people dress a certain way because they don't want to be out of touch, where boys wear pants down to their knees, which nobody has compelled them to do but they pick up the cultural norms, or where girls are improperly dressed by my eyes, but that's what they see in the media. — Hillary Clinton

As more and more norms disappear from social praxis, literature faces ever-growing difficulties. Its predicament is beginning to resemble that of a child who has discovered that his incredibly understanding parents will let him break with impunity all his toys, indeed everything in the house. The artist cannot create specific prohibitions for himself in order to attack them later in his work; the prohibitions must be real, and hence independent of the writer's choices. And since the relativization of cultural norms has not so far been able to disturb the given characteristics of human biology, that is where writers today seek the still perceptible points of resistance
which is why literature is preoccupied with the theme of sex. — Stanislaw Lem

I feel like a part of my role being a musician and part of why I want to be a musician is to show women an alternative to sort of the cultural norms, the stereotypes of what we're supposed to be, demure and quiet and motherly. — Janet Weiss

Low-income Americans' potential for mobility is often impaired by family breakdown, cultural dysfunction, and the polarization of norms — Yuval Levin

Traditional laws and cultural norms are flimsy mantles of power and influence. Democracy, however, when it is truly exercised, is a stone fortress that cannot be surmounted, blown asunder, or burrowed under. — J.R. Ward

The standard story of cultural conflict in America has conservative Christians defending established forms of social authority, while Progressives see themselves as challenging established norms and institutions, a self-assessment that the media accept at face value. The reality is the opposite. The counter-culturalism of the Faithful gives them an independent spirit. The committed core of Christians in America increasingly lives on the peripheries of cultural and institutional power. The Engaged Progressives, in command of civic institutions, are the establishmentarians. A — R. R. Reno

Through developing trusting and respectful relationships with the boys in our lives, we can help boys to value and acknowledge their relational capabilities, which they may otherwise learn to discount or overlook. We can also offer and model for them definitions of maturity, masculinity, health and success that will enable them to remain grounded in their self-knowledge (e.g. as they encounter societal pressures to conform to group and cultural norms), and to form relationships that will sustain rather than constrain them. — Judy Chu

For groups that made this political transition to egalitarianism, there was a quantum leap in the development of moral matrices. People now lived in much denser webs of norms, informal sanctions, and occasionally violent punishments. Those who could navigate this new world skillfully and maintain good reputations were rewarded by gaining the trust, cooperation, and political support of others. Those who could not respect group norms, or who acted like bullies, were removed from the gene pool by being shunned, expelled, or killed. Genes and cultural practices (such as the collective killing of deviants) coevolved. The end result, says Boehm, was a process sometimes called "self-domestication." Just as animal breeders can create tamer, gentler creatures by selectively breeding for those traits, our ancestors began to selectively breed themselves (unintentionally) for the ability to construct shared moral matrices and then live cooperatively within them. — Jonathan Haidt

Beauty might prevail in the very short term, but in the medium and longer terms, cultural norms - primarily those values and norms influenced by family - were more important. — Nicholas Sparks

Any discussion of male codependency, even one rooted in early attachment dis-ruption, must address the pressures of the social-norm context for male devel-opment. These pressures are often referred to in the literature as "gender role strain." Gender role strain in men has been identified as either the failure to fulfill male role expectations or the traumatic fulfillment of these expectations, and their negative consequences. One proposed cause of gender role strain is the early gender role socialization process which begins within the family context and is supported by a larger cultural socialization based on patriarchy. — Mary Crocker Cook

For most inhabitants of the Arab world, the prevailing cultural attitude toward women - fed and encouraged by Wahhabi doctrine, which is based on Bedouin social norms rather than Islamic jurisprudence - often trumps the rights accorded to women by Islam. — G. Willow Wilson

Cultural dominance of middle-class norms prevail in middle-class schools with a teacher teaching toward those standards and with students striving to maintain those standards. — James S. Coleman

When somebody goes outside the cultural norms, the culture has to protect itself. — Robert M. Pirsig

The story of liberty and its future is not only about the raw assertion of rights but also about grace, aesthetics, beauty, complexity, service to others, community, the gradual emergence of cultural norms, and the spontaneous development of extended orders of commercial and private relationships. Freedom is what gives life to the human imagination and enables the working out of love as it extends from our most benevolent and highest longings. — Jeffrey Tucker

For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norms, even our cultural ideal. — Carl Bernstein

Depression as one example is an illness that has a chemical basis, but also is deeply embedded in cultural norms about gender, social class, race. — Jonathan Michel Metzl

At the social/political/ juridical, etc., level, the organizing principle was less to do with games and more to do with the nature of taboos - enormously powerful, often enormously arbitrary, and (crucially) regularly quietly broken, without undermining the fact of the taboo itself. That last element, I think, is sometimes underestimated in the discussions of cultural norms, where they are both asserted and breached. Both those elements are foundational.
- author interview — China Mieville

What has become clear to me is that it is not the inherent nature of being gay that causes such a reduced life; it is, rather, the social circumstances around being gay: the perceptions of it and the cultural norms that it is said to violate. As some of those norms have changed, I have been able to be gay, to have a marriage, to have a family, and to have - if there is wood to knock on - a fortunate and happy life. — Andrew Solomon

Beautiful speech doesn't need protection, it's ugly speech that needs protection. We have these cultural norms that allow people to say really ugly things. You don't have to invite them to your dinner party, but you should let them say it. — Jeff Bezos

We've been playing games since humanity had civilization - there is something primal about our desire and our ability to play games. It's so deep-seated that it can bypass latter-day cultural norms and biases. — Jane McGonigal

In places like South Afghanistan, where cultural norms prevent men from entering homes, female vaccinators often make the difference between a closed or opened door. — Ksenia Solo

Remember, government is not an enlightened organization designed to promote public welfare. It is barbaric, uncivilized forcemilitary and police power put to the service of the insiders who control it. Yes, there are constraints on the way the insiders use their power. There are 'checks and balances,' built into the constitution, for example. And there are cultural norms and traditional prohibitions. But eventually, the norms and traditions wear off, like painkillers. And then, the pain of raw government begins again. — Bill Bonner

At the individual level, the great controlling myth of our time has been the belief that within each of us there is a real, inner, private 'self', long buried beneath layers of socialization and attempted cultural and religious control, and needing to be rediscovered if we are to live authentic lives. When we 'discover' this 'true authentic self' , we must do whatever it dictates, even if it means ignoring the norms of the 'unenlightened' society all around us. — N. T. Wright

In every single culture I encountered, there were always women who defied cultural norms to do what they believed was right for them. This phenomenon has never been related to how rich, poor, successful or not successful the woman may be. — Zainab Salbi

Second, there is something insidiously pathological about the melting pot concept in its assumption that groups should assimilate. Wehrly states, "Cultural assimilation, as practiced in the United States, is the expectation by the people in power that all immigrants and people outside the dominant group will give up their ethnic and cultural values and will adopt the values and norms of the dominant society - the White, male Euro-Americans" (1995, p. 5). Many psychologists of color, however, have referred to this process as cultural genocide, an outcome of colonial thought (Guthrie, 1997; Thomas & Sillen, 1972). — Derald Wing Sue

In India, at the community level, young men are playing an absolutely essential role in changing the cultural norms and deeply held practices concerning women. They are doing this in a way that not only empowers women and girls, but really empowers the young men as well. — Melanne Verveer

We discover truth by asking rapier-like questions that cut through the thick fog of doctrinarism. Artists and philosophers must be subversive: we need these rebellious cynics to ask questions, they must resist cultural norms; seek out truths that are not self-evident and challenge everything. Doubt, not blind belief, is essential for discovering truth. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Many Americans and Western Europeans proudly trumpet the diversity of cosmopolises like London and New York without realizing that cosmopolitanism does not mean people of different skin colors all sitting around over wine at a bistro table complaining about organized religion. It means people who hold profoundly different, even mutually exclusive, beliefs and cultural norms functioning in a shared space based on toleration of disagreement. — Jonathan A.C. Brown

A cultural shift is not always an ideological one - or at least not always the one you imagine. Our norms are always evolving. — David Harsanyi

Vaccination was, and is, thoroughly infused with our politics, our social values, and our cultural norms. By acknowledging and understanding the divergent reasons why we've vaccinated in the past, however, we just may ensure the continued success of vaccination in the future. — Elena Conis

When it comes to dying and the risks of a bad death, does our responsibility as doctors override cultural values? Is it ever acceptable to bypass cultural norms and expectations in an attempt to get to the human truth? While in many cultures the tradition is to work through the family rather than talk directly to the patient during the dying process, the potential for harm is great, and patients may unintentionally be held hostage by their families. — Jessica Nutik Zitter

As for me, I would rather be wrong for doing right than to be right while doing wrong. In other words, obey God rather than the cultural mores, denominational standards, religious traditions, and theological interpretations and practices. Sometimes society norms will try to make you think you are wrong when you are right. Other times, you may even be persecuted for doing the right things in the eyes of God. Whichever way the tides turn, you just have to be prepared to stand on holy ground for God. — Alvin E. Miller Sr.

Young children begin very early to internalize information that either encourages or discourages self-disclosure. Cues are intuitively understood. Most of what we feel is unexamined and articulated. Cultural norms are unwittingly absorbed. We learn when to speak and when to stay silent. - Pam MacRae (Ch. 2) — Rosalie De Rosset

For to change the norms, the very foci of attention, of a cultural system is a difficult task - far more complex than that of changing an individual's attitudes and interests. — James S. Coleman