Selected norms quotes

1. In a mad world, only the mad are sane.

2. Art is what you can get away with.

3. It's good to know that if I behave strangely enough, society will take full responsibility for me.

4. You know, a long time ago being crazy meant something. Nowadays everybody's crazy.

5. Whenever I go out with other married couples, I like to bring along a single crackhead. Just to spice things up.

6. Since when was genius found respectable?

7. Do not adjust your sandals while passing through a melon-field, nor yet arrange your hat beneath an orange-tree.

8. Leopards break into the temple and drink the sacrificial chalices dry; this occurs repeatedly, again and again; finally it can be reckoned upon beforehand and becomes part of the ceremony.

9. We're supposed to procreate and society, god knows, is ferocious on the subject. Heterosexuality is considered such a great and natural good that you have to execute people and put them in prison if they don't practice this glorious act.

10. Moralities, ethics, laws, customs, beliefs, doctrines - these are of trifling import. All that matters is that the miraculous become the norm.

11. To be on foot in the United States is only immoral, not illegal.

12. Old age is an excellent time for outrage. My goal is to say or do at least one outrageous thing every week.

13. Art is anything you can get away with.

14. Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.

15. If being sane is thinking there's something wrong with being different...I'd rather be completely fucking mental.

16. A man must know how to fly in the face of opinion; a woman to submit to it.

17. Today's shocks are tomorrow's conventions.

18. 'Political Correctness doesn't change us, it shuts us up.'

19. The idea that I would ever end up on David Letterman or Jay Leno is horrifying. I am such a freak in comparison to most other twenty-five-year-old guys. I have no idea what other people are thinking. I'm not really in touch.

20. The fifties were when people started coming down on 'juvenile delinquents,' 'hoodlums,' 'vandals'--anybody that was young, wore a motorcycle jacket, and didn't act polite around older people.

21. If a stranger taps you on the ass and says, 'How's the little lady today!' you will probably cringe. But if he's an American, he's only being friendly.

22. Laws are sand, customs are rock. Laws can be evaded and punishment escaped, but an openly transgressed custom brings sure punishment.

23. 'And how comfortless is the thought that the sickness of the normal does not necessarily imply as its opposite the health of the sick, but that the latter usually only present, in a different way, the same disastrous pattern.'

24. It had always been a notion of mine that sanity is like a clearing in the jungle where the humans agree to meet from time to time and behave in certain fixed ways that even a baboon could master, like Englishmen dressing for dinner in the tropics.

25. 'I know nothing about sex because I was always married.'

26. He has a woman's name and wears makeup. How original.

27. Custom reconciles us to every thing.

28. Society can overlook murder, adultery or swindling - it never forgives the preaching of a new gospel.

29. Why should you call me to account for eating decently?

30. When will we realize that the fact that we can become accustomed to anything, however disgusting at first, makes it necessary to examine carefully everything we have become accustomed to.

31. Chastity is a monkish and evangelical superstition, a greater foe to natural temperance even than unintellectual sensuality; it strikes at the root of all domestic happiness, and consigns more than half the human race to misery.

32. Thy wisdom speaks in me, and bids me dare Beacon the rocks on which high hearts are wreckt. I never was attached to that great sect, Whose doctrine is, that each one should select Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend, And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend To cold oblivion, though it is in the code Of modern morals, and the beaten road Which those poor slaves with weary footsteps tread, Who travel to their home among the dead By the broad highway of the world, and so With one chained friend, - perhaps a jealous foe, The dreariest and the longest journey go.

33. Our national drug is alcohol. We tend to regard the use of any other drug with special horror. (p. 201)

34. It is very well to say 'be prudent, be careful, try to know each other.' But how are you to know each other? Unless a woman had lost all pride, how is it possible for her, under the eyes of all her family, to indulge in long exclusive conversations with a man? 'Such a thing' must not take place till after her 'engagement.' And how is she to make an engagement, if 'such a thing' has not taken place?

35. I think extreme heterosexuality is a perversion.

36. Of course it's extremely easy to say, the heck with it. I'm just going to adapt myself to the structures of power and authority and do the best I can within them. Sure, you can do that. But that's not acting like a decent person. You can walk down the street and be hungry. You see a kid eating an ice cream cone and you notice there's no cop around and you can take the ice cream cone from him because you're bigger and walk away. You can do that. Probably there are people who do. We call them 'pathological.' On the other hand, if they do it within existing social structures we call them 'normal.' But it's just as pathological. It's just the pathology of the general society.

37. Just another deviation from the norm. Heh heh, I like those!

38. 'Some people dye their hair yellow or put rings in their noses' - explaining why he didn't have a bank account in 1993, to the Mahon Tribunal 20/12/2007. [5]

39. Ignorance: 'The common person fears to think beyond the common.'

40. We're pretty straight guys: we're not boozers, we're not fucked up on drugs.

41. You know what gets me? ... How everybody says 'fuck' and 'shit' all the time. I used to be scared shitless I'd say 'fuck' or 'shit' in public, by accident. Now everybody says 'fuck' and 'shit', 'fuck' and 'shit' all the time. Something very big must have happened while we were out of the country.

42. Little John: 'Let's face it - you've got to be a man to wear tights!'

43. These are three concrete steps that, I believe, can readily be taken. Protect the material and strengthen verification. Control the fuel cycle. Accelerate disarmament efforts. But that is not enough. The hard part is: how do we create an environment in which nuclear weapons - like slavery or genocide - are regarded as a taboo and a historical anomaly?

44. Wreaking blood and carnage in the normal European Christian manner?

45. If I did become Minister of Nudism, I'd be allowed to be on television every evening around nine thirty. I'd come on and say 'Good evening. This is the Minister of Nudism. Take off your clothes and begin to dance about.'

46. Once you had read the Psychopathology of Everyday Life, you knew that everyday life was psychopathology.

47. 'Devotees of multiculturalism and political correctness who do not see how damaging to the fabric of American civilization it is to allow Ellison to choose his own book need only imagine a racist elected to Congress. Would they allow him to choose Hitler's' Mein Kampf,' the Nazis' bible, for his oath? And if not, why not?'

48. He's intense about whatever bothers him. I think the whole commotion is because he's from the filmindustry and yet he is so faithful to his wife. Here men aren't supposed to be monogamous. But Shahrukh isn't filmi in the least. He is like any other man from any other walk of life who loves his wife a lot. I'm glad he is an exception to the rule of star husbands who are not faithful to their wives. - Gauri

49. In America, more than anywhere else in the world, care has been taken constantly to trace clearly distinct spheres of action for the two sexes, and both are required to keep in step, but along paths that are never the same.

50. Nothing seems at first sight less important than the outward form of human actions, yet there is nothing upon which men set more store: they grow used to everything except to living in a society which has not their own manners.

51. The Americans never use the word peasant, because they have no idea of the class which that term denotes; the ignorance of more remote ages, the simplicity of rural life, and the rusticity of the villager have not been preserved among them; and they are alike unacquainted with the virtues, the vices, the coarse habits, and the simple graces of an early stage of civilization.

52. Mad, adj. Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence; not conforming to standards of thought, speech, and action derived by the conformants [sic] from study of themselves; at odds with the majority; in short, unusual. It is noteworthy that persons are pronounced mad by officials destitute of evidence that they themselves are sane.

53. Think of a senator winning the Democratic nomination in the year 2000 whose positions included halving the military budget, socializing the medical system, re-regulating the communications and electrical industries, establishing a guaranteed minimum income for all Americans, and equalizing funding for all schools regardless of property valuations - and who promised to fire Alan Greenspan, counseled withdrawal from the World Trade Organization, and, for good measure, spoke warmly of adolescent sexual experimentation. He would lose in a landslide. He would be relegated to the ash heap of history. But if the precedent of 1964 were repeated, two years later the country would begin electing dozens of men and women just like him. And not many decades later, Republicans would have to proclaim softer versions of those positions to get taken seriously for their party's nomination.

54. If women fall over wearing heels, that's embarrassing; but if a bloke falls over wearing heels, then you have to kill yourself! End of your life!

55. When I did Bangladesh, I spent a couple of months, every day and night, on the telephone, trying to trick people into doing it and making a commitment. Nowadays, you phone somebody up, and it's an accepted part of life that every so often you give something to charity.

56. If women dressed for men, the stores wouldn't sell much -- just an occasional sun visor.

57. Safe, sane and consensual - what do those words really mean? Assimilation, that's what.

58. We are on the cusp of this time where I can say, 'I speak as a citizen of the world' without others saying, 'God, what a nut.'

59. We live in a world with 'free' content, and this freedom is not an imperfection. We listen to the radio without paying for the songs we hear; we hear friends humming tunes that they have not licensed. We tell jokes that reference movie plots without the permission of the directors. We read our children books, borrowed from a library, without paying the original copyright holder for the performance rights.

60. I want to perform an unnatural act.

61. I'm afraid I'm not sufficiently inhibited about the things that other women are inhibited about for me. They feel that you've given away trade secrets.

62. A nightcap decked his brows instead of bay, A cap by night - a stocking all the day!

63. Bigamy is having a wife too many, monogamy is the same.

64. One is always afraid of upsetting their conventionalities.

65. Health consists of having the same diseases as one's neighbours.

66. Yousef Al-Khattab: When you take the women and dress them like whores, on the street... Richard Dawkins: I don't dress women, they dress themselves... Yousef Al-Khattab: But you allow it as a norm, to let the women go on the street dressed like this. What's going on with your society?

67. Geniuses and supergeniuses always make their own rules on sex as on everything else; they do not accept the monkey customs of their lessers.

68. To me, the most obscene word in the language is celibacy.