New Norm Quotes & Sayings

It's not enough to withdraw from society and seek your own salvation, your own individuation. The individuator must return to society ("collectivity") to contribute his or her new insights, his or her new values, which must be at least equal to if not greater than the norm. — Gary Valentine Lachman

If you want to be in the world I live in, which is a creative world with new ideas, then you've got to get away from the norm. You've got to go for it. — Jerry Weintraub

Do-it-yourself morality, informed by personal passion rather than old-fogey morality, is the new norm. — Anonymous

This sense of the brain's remarkable plasticity, its capacity for the most striking adaptations, not least in the special (and often desperate) circumstances of neural or sensory mishap, has come to dominate my own perception of my patients and their lives. So much so, indeed, that I am sometimes moved to wonder whether it may not be necessary to redefine the very concepts of "health" and "disease," to see these in terms of the ability of the organism to create a new organization and order, one that fits its special, altered disposition and needs, rather than in the terms of a rigidly defined "norm. — Oliver Sacks

I wasn't living on the edge, I had gone over it. Insanity was now the norm and I had to keep feeding it in order to maintain the new domain I had created for myself. I had one eye on the road and one on the rear view mirror when I wasn't pre-occupied with my beer, cigarettes or car stereo. — Steven C. Smith

Around year seven or eight, you'd kill yourself when you realized Norm had to enter and you had to come up with a new beer joke. — Ted Danson

I was brought up by my grandparents. So people go, 'Oh, what was that like? That must have been hard.' And you go: 'No, it wasn't.' It was just completely actually normal because the new norm seems to be whatever you make of it, doesn't it? — James McAvoy

It's easy to underestimate how profound and holistic Roddenberry's vision of the techscape of the future was. By today's standards, the available technology of 1964 was downright primitive. Doors did not open automatically when we approached them. The first handheld calculator was still in the future, as were microwave ovens and cell phones. 1964 was a year before most Americans had even heard of a place called Vietnam, five years before man walked on the moon, 25 years before anyone ever surfed the Internet. Your phone had a curly cord, and the new innovation of "touchtone" dialing was merely a year old. Even the television sets that viewers watched would be considered positively prehistoric today. Most TVs were black-and-white models, and the majority of those sets had no remote control. There was no cable or satellite; rabbit ears and roof-top antennas were the norm. The world looked, and was, different. — Marc Cushman

In 'The General Strike,' we celebrate those who bring a new vision for the world to the table. People who stand for workers rights, human rights, a just representative political system, and a new mode of doing business where sustainability is the norm not the exception. — Justin Sane

So this was how our assistant directors were finding their guidance? Dug up from five-year-old e-mails? Later I learned that the staff members had to print out their e-mails in order to store them in safety. Evidently, the New York office server was scrubbed periodically to free up storage space. Dawn couldn't save e-mails on her computer for long. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. A five-year-old crumpled paper copy of an e-mail in one employee's files held crucial documentation for a federal agency? If SEC inspectors ever arrived at a financial firm for an examination and discovered that the firm had no manual on how to comply with federal securities laws, that firm would immediately be cited for deficiencies and most likely subject to enforcement action. — Norm Champ

Answers are not enough, students should be encouraged to ask questions and explore alternatives to the norm. Entrepreneurship and invention are the backbone of the new economy, yet I doubt they get more than a nod in economics courses. — Jim Hunt

On Intelligence:
Intelligence will not make you rich unless your intelligence is about getting rich.
Corollary: Intelligence will lead one to to appreciate things that cost money over things that make money.
Corollary: Being a genius is antithetical to being successful unless you're a genius at being successful.
Corollary: Being intelligent does not make you rich but it can keep you from being poor.
Corollary: Intelligence leads to interests, mostly not gainful.
Corollary: Intelligence is like molasses, with effort, it goes where you put it.
Rubbers are best for those who refuse to use them.
Corollary: Intelligence adds but stupidity multiplies.
Corollary: Reverse evolution is the new norm.
Only luck can save one from one's own stupidity.
Only idiots regard a second chance the same as the first.
The higher the IQ, the greater the chance of self-deception.
Still waters are often shallow puddles. — Kalifer Deil

What may be learned from the rebuttals made by the defendants in New Jersey and from the protests that were sparked by the decision of the court? Much of the resistance, it appears, derives from a conservative anxiety that equity equates to "leveling." The fear that comes across in many of the letters and the editorials in the New Jersey press is that democratizing opportunity will undermine diversity and even elegance in our society and that the best schools will be dragged down to a sullen norm, a mediocre middle ground of uniformity. References to Eastern European socialism keep appearing in these letters. — Jonathan Kozol

New Orleans was the ideal town for an underachiever, a place where whiling away Saturdays on the stoop or on projects so underproductive they wouldn't count as hobbies in other cities was the norm. This environment suited me and other people who, like me, wanted to appear more industrious than average without doing much work. — Sara Roahen

If development is the new name for peace, war and preparations for war are the major enemy of the healthy development of peoples. If we take the common good of all humanity as our norm, instead of individual greed, peace would be possible. — Pope John Paul II

We are also working on the restoration of salmon runs, and we are doing a new process of mass marking with these fish so we can tell the wild fish from the hatchery fish. — Norm Dicks

I had become too accustomed to the pseudo-Left new style, whereby if your opponent thought he had identified your lowest possible motive, he was quite certain that he had isolated the only real one. This vulgar method, which is now the norm and the standard in much non-Left journalism as well, is designed to have the effect of making any noisy moron into a master analyst. — Christopher Hitchens

When a person is evoked for who she is, not who she is not, the most often result will be the inner healing of her heart through the touch of affirmation.
Jesus said you are to love one another as I have loved you, a love that will possibly lead to the bloody, anguish gift of yourself, a love that forgives seven times seven, that keeps no record of wrong. This is the criterion, sole norm, the standard of discipleship in the New Israel of God. — Brennan Manning

In these centuries when God, ... was forging a Christian church so that it might fulfill the longing of a hungry world, He was at the same time perfecting His first religion, Judaism, so that it might stand as the permanent norm against which to judge all others. Whenever, in the future some new religion strayed too far from the basic precepts of Judaism, God could be assured that it was in error; so in the Galilee, His ancient cauldron of faith, he spent as much time upon the old Jews as He did upon the new Christians. — James A. Michener

There is nothing in the Quran or early Muslim religious literature to suggest an iconoclastic attitude. Grabar has argued that Muslim calligraphy and vegetal arts were most likely a pragmatic adaptation to the need for a new imperial-Islamic emblem distinct from the Byzantine and Sasanian portraits of emperors. The use of vegetal designs and writing was prior to any religious theory about them. Once adopted, they became the norm for Islamic public art. Theories about Islamic iconoclasm were developed later. — Ira M. Lapidus

When content scarcity was the norm, we could live with a minimum of context. In a limited market, our editors became skilled in making decisions about what would be published. Now, in an era of abundance, editors have inherited a new and fundamentally different role: figuring out how "what is published" will be discovered. — Hugh McGuire

So long as the New Testament served to decipher the Old, it was taken as an absolute norm. — Paul Ricoeur

The tribalizing power of the new electronic media, the way in which they return to us to the unified fields of the old oral cultures, to tribal cohesion and pre-individualist patterns of thought, is little understood. Tribalism is the sense of the deep bond of family, the closed society as the norm of community. — Marshall McLuhan

I've grown up watching and admiring Norm. Sherie actually starred in the first off-Broadway show I ever saw in New York, which was The Last Five Years. It's amazing how things come full-circle and how the community (once you hang around it long enough) grows smaller and smaller as it grows. Sharing the stage with these people is more than a dream come true it's so special. They're so warm and giving and offer the best advice. Sherie is very nice and maternal and nurturing. — Tituss Burgess

Christ is the norm, the criterion, the purpose, and the meaning of the book. The book points to Christ; Christ does not point to the book. We are not the People of the Book; we are the People with the Book. The Gospel of John does not say, "God so loved the world that he gave us" a book (3:16). The Revelation of John does not say that we are saved "by the ink of the Lamb" (12:11). For over a hundred years Christians have asked WWJD? (What Would Jesus Do?) and not WWBS? (What Would the Bible Say?). If Christ is the norm of the gospel, then he is also the norm of the New Testament, and of the entire Christian Bible. That, of course, is why we are called Christ-ians and not Bible-ians. — John Dominic Crossan

Seeing Michaels treat his dog like that was the equivalent of watching how a new love interest interacted with your kids. He was amazing with Bookem and it was obvious Book liked him right back. It pulled at Judge's heart. Food wasn't the quickest way to his heart, although it helped, but Bookem was. Most men feared him and didn't want him anywhere around. Judge would simply fuck them quickly and send them on their way. Michaels was not the norm. He was partner material. Judge turned on the taps and grimaced at his next thought. Michaels was going to make some man very happy one day. Judge — A.E. Via

I always suggest to women to take time away from the norm. And that takes a lot of courage. Most people can't do that, they can't loose and run, and say, 'Look, I'm going to just have an entirely new environment, devoid of all the habitual concerns of the day.' — Maya Tiwari

Women's liberation and empowerment are terms feminists started using to talk about casting off the limitations imposed upon women and demanding equality. We have perverted these words. The freedom to be sexually provocative or promiscuous is not enough freedom; it is not the only 'women's issue' worth paying attention to. And we are not even free in the sexual arena. We have simply adopted a new norm, a new role to play: lusty, busty exhibitionist. There are other choices. If we are really going to be sexually liberated, we need to make room for a range of options as wide as the variety of human desire. We need to allow ourselves the freedom to figure out what we internally want from sex instead of mimicking whatever popular culture holds up to us as sexy. That would be liberation. — Ariel Levy

Once you break the social norm and create a new social norm, all of a sudden it can stay with us for a long time. — Dan Ariely

All U.S. irony is based on an implicit "I don't really mean what I say." So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it's impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it's too bad it's impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today's irony ends up saying: "How very banal to ask what I mean." Anyone with the heretical gall to ask an ironist what he actually stands for ends up looking like a hysteric or a prig. And herein lies the oppressiveness of institutionalized irony, the too-successful rebel: the ability to interdict the question without attending to its content is tyranny. It is the new junta, using the very tool that exposed its enemy to insulate itself.
This is why our educated teleholic friends' use of weary cynicism to try to seem superior to TV is so pathetic. — David Foster Wallace

When it comes to cyber warfare, we have more to lose than any other nation on earth. The technical sector is the backbone of the American economy, and if we start engaging in these kind of behaviors, in these kind of attacks, we're setting a standard, we're creating a new international norm of behavior that says this is what nations do. This is what developed nations do. — Edward Snowden

It was an interesting night. I'd never been to a non-Jewish wedding, and Phelan assured me that this one was not the norm. The bride and groom got pissed as newts - he ended up passed out, sprawled face down in his own vomit, while she did the cancan on the bridal table, flashing something old, which apparently was nothing new. — Paula Houseman

These coupling certainly do not fit with the mainstream idea that genes, or at least organisms, are hell-bent on reproducing themselves. They do fit, however, with the idea of a social role for sex, and they fit with the idea that sexual reproduction is a spandrel, a by-product of some other phenomenon. If Roughgarden is on to something, she believes it could have cultural as well as scientific implications. The orthodoxy of biology has corroded our culture like battery acid, she says, In general, we play out the roles prescribed for us by that culture - aggressive male and coy female - because deviation from its "norm" results in emotional and physical violence, bigotry, personal guilt, and criminalized behaviors. If biology has been getting it wrong though, the new orthodoxy could trigger an infusion of tolerance; perhaps the anomalous prevalence of sexual reproduction will end up having deeper repercussions outside of science than within it. — Michael Brooks

In 2013, 71 percent of black children in America were born to an unwed mother, as were 53 percent of Hispanic children and 36 percent of white children. Indeed, a single parent is the new norm. — Nicholas Kristof

Last year, Congress gave the Department of Defense the authority to design a new civilian personnel system for its employees as part of the defense authorization bill. — Norm Dicks

Instead of constantly enhancing the norm - forever upping the ante of the 'normal' with new technologies - we should work on enhancing the concept of normal by broadening appreciation of anatomical variation. — Alice Dreger

I find it surreal, then perfectly normal. I'm struck by how fast the surreal becomes the norm. I marvel at how unexciting it is to be famous, how mundane famous people are. They're confused, uncertain, insecure, and often hate what they do. It's something we always hear - like that old adage that money can't buy happiness-but we never believe it until we see it ourselves. Seeing it in 1992 brings me a new measure of confidence. — Andre Agassi

Like the medieval heretics that Norm Cohn wrote about in The Pursuit of the Millennium, the Beats cultivated an extreme narcissism that bordered on self-deification and that 'liberated them from all restraints' and allowed them to experience every impulse as a 'divine command'. What Norman Podhoretz observed of Ginsberg was also true of the Beats generally: they 'conjured up a world of complete freedom from the limits imposed by [bourgeois] responsibilities'. Podhoretz added, 'It was a world that promised endless erotic possibility together with the excitements of an expanded consciousness constantly open to new dimensions of being: more adventure, more sex, more intensity, more life'. Alas, the promise was illusory. Instead of an 'expanded consciousness', the Beats purchased madness, ruination, and, for many, an early death. Their attack on bourgeois responsibility led not to greater freedom but to greater chaos. The erotic paradise they envisioned turned out to be rife with misery. — Roger Kimball

Long gone is the time when we [blacks] opposed the notion that we all looked alike and talked alike. Somehow we have come to exalt the new black stereotype above all and demand conformity to that norm ... [However], I assert my right to think for myself, to refuse to have my ideas assigned to me as though I was an intellectual slave because I'm black. — Clarence Thomas

If your deepest self is singing and coaxing you straight toward the bonfire, is it better to turn away? Stop your ears with wax? Ignore all the perverse glory your heart is screaming at you? Set yourself on the course that will lead you dutifully towards the norm, reasonable hours and regular medical check-ups, stable relationships and steady career advancement, the New York Times and brunch on Sunday, all with the promise of being somehow a better person? Or - like Boris - is it better to throw yourself head first and laughing into the holy rage calling your name? It's — Donna Tartt

During the past 30 years, European governments have provided more than $15 billion in the form of low- and no-cost loans to Airbus for the specific purpose of developing new aircraft lines. — Norm Dicks

I just got back from New York. You ever been there? There was a big gay parade going on there when I was there, and I never been to one of them, and I like a parade. I always like a parade. So, I go there, and it turns out, it's just a bunch of gay guys. — Norm MacDonald

Who in the world wants to run a country where the new norm is one where there are no jobs? — Rush Limbaugh

Here the contention is not just that the new Darwinian paradigm can help us realize whichever moral values we happen to choose. The claim is that the new paradigm can actually influence - legitimately - our choice of basic values in the first place. Some Darwinians insist that such influence can never be legitimate. What they have in mind is the naturalistic fallacy, whose past violation has so tainted their line of work. But what we're doing here doesn't violate the naturalistic fallacy. Quite the opposite. By studying nature - by seeing the origins of the retributive impulse - we see how we have been conned into committing the naturalistic fallacy without knowing it; we discover that the aura of divine truth surrounding retribution is nothing more than a tool with which nature - natural selection - gets us to uncritically accept its "values." Once this revelation hits norm, we are less likely to obey this aura, and thus less likely to commit the fallacy. — Robert Wright