Deviance Quotes

“If little else, the brain is an educational toy.

The problem with possessing such an engaging toy is that other people want to play with it, too. Sometime they'd rather play with yours than theirs. Or they object if you play with yours in a different manner from the way they play with theirs. The result is, a few games out of a toy department of possibilities are universally and endlessly repeated. If you don't play some people's game, they say that you have "lost your marbles," not recognizing that, while Chinese checkers is indeed a fine pastime, a person may also play dominoes, chess, strip poker, tiddlywinks, drop-the-soap or Russian roulette with his brain.”
― Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

“The deviant and the conformist...are creatures of the same culture, inventions of the same imagination.”
― Kai Erikson

“Deviant' is the weapon of the normative to discredit and demonize the Other.”
― Jamie Arpin-Ricci

“A more fundamental problem with labelling human distress and deviance as mental disorder is that it reduces a complex, important, and distinct part of human life to nothing more than a biological illness or defect, not to be processed or understood, or in some cases even embraced, but to be ‘treated’ and ‘cured’ by any means possible—often with drugs that may be doing much more harm than good. This biological reductiveness, along with the stigma that it attracts, shapes the person’s interpretation and experience of his distress or deviance, and, ultimately, his relation to himself, to others, and to the world. Moreover, to call out every difference and deviance as mental disorder is also to circumscribe normality and define sanity, not as tranquillity or possibility, which are the products of the wisdom that is being denied, but as conformity, placidity, and a kind of mediocrity.”
― Neel Burton, The Meaning of Madness

“When you're accustomed to being considered 'normal', difference feels like a perversion.”
― Jamie Arpin-Ricci

“Deviation from the word of God is sentimentality and says 'you're right' to this one, and 'you're right' to that one, and the guy in the middle is an ass-hole.”
― Milton Rokeach, The Three Christs of Ypsilanti: A Psychological Study

“A slow but steady transformation of deviance has taken place in American society. It has not been a change in behavior as such, but in how behavior is defined. Deviant behaviors that were once defined as immoral, sinful, or criminal have been given medical meanings. Some say that rehabilitation has replaced punishment, but in many cases medical treatments have become a new form of punishment and social control.”
― Peter Conrad, Deviance and Medicalization: From Badness to Sickness

“One of the deadliest tools of powerful systems is narrow definitions of what is "normal" and the reduction of difference to deviance.”
― Jamie Arpin-Ricci

“Unless a theologian has the inner fortitude of a desert saint, he has only one effective remedy against the threat of cognitive collapse in the face of these pressures: he must huddle together with like-minded fellow deviants⁠—and huddle very closely indeed. Only in a countercommunity of considerable strength does cognitive deviance have a chance to maintain itself. The countercommunity provides continuing therapy against the creeping doubt as to whether, after all, one may not be wrong and the majority right. To fulfill its functions of providing social support for the deviant body of "knowledge," the countercommunity must provide a strong sense of solidarity among its members (a "fellowship of the saints" in a world rampant with devils) and it must be quite closed vis-à-vis the outside ("Be not yoked together with unbelievers"); in sum, it must be a kind of ghetto.”
― Peter L. Berger, A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural

“What a beautiful madness, to explore the darkness in one's own soul and find joy in the unearthing of such wicked thoughts.”
― Wiss Auguste

“Death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again forever. I envied those who could believe in a God and I distrusted them. I felt they were keeping their courage up with a fable of the changeless and the permanent. Death was far more certain than God, and with death there would be no longer the daily possibility of love dying. The nightmare of a future of boredom and indifference would lift. I could never have been a pacifist. To kill a man was surely to grant him an immeasurable benefit. Oh yes, people always, everywhere, loved their enemies. It was their friends they preserved for pain and vacuity.”
― Graham Greene, The Quiet American

“Tolerance does explain an escalating pattern of sexual addiction. Tolerance occurs in either fantasy or behavior. For example, an addict using benign fantasies to become sexually aroused may progress to needing sadomasochistic fantasies. Or the addict may switch from fantasies to behavior when the addict reaches a level of tolerance to fantasies alone.”
― Kenneth M. Adams, Silently Seduced: When Parents Make Their Children Partners : Understanding Covert Incest

“You have doubtless read Trotter’s Instincts of the Herd in War and Peace, Mister Bond. Well, I am by nature and predilection a wolf and I live by a wolf’s laws. Naturally the sheep describe such a person as a “criminal”. ‘The fact, Mister Bond,’ The Big Man continued after a pause, ‘that I survive and indeed enjoy limitless success, although I am alone against countless millions of sheep, is attributable to the modern techniques I described to you on the occasion of our last talk, and to an infinite capacity for taking pains. Not dull, plodding pains, but artistic, subtle pains. And I find, Mister Bond, that it is not difficult to outwit sheep, however many of them there may be, if one is dedicated to the task and if one is by nature an extremely well-equipped wolf.”
― Ian Fleming, Live and Let Die

“Deviance is in the eye of the beholder”
― Anonymous

“Neither of us mentioned him when we woke on the morning after his death...One is not jealous of the dead, and it seemed easy to me that morning to take up our old life together.”
― Graham Greene, The Quiet American

“Suddenly watching her feet, so light and precise and mistress of his shuffle, I was in love again.”
― Graham Greene, The Quiet American

“One always spoke of her like that in the third person as though she were not there. Sometimes she seemed invisible like peace.”
― Graham Greene, The Quiet American

“Being a sex radical means being defiant as well as deviant.”
― Patrick Califia-Rice, Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex

“Extremes of any combination come to be seen as 'psychiatric deviance.' In the argument presented here, where disorder begins is entirely down to social convention, and where one decides to draw the line across the (human) spectrum (of dispositional diversity).”
― Damian Milton, A Mismatch of Salience

“If you don't like my queer ways you can kiss my fucking ass”
― Howard S. Becker, Outsiders: Studies In The Sociology Of Deviance

“It always astonishes me to discover people who think that religion and sex have nothing to do with one another, and that you can act as you like in the one sphere while thinking what you should in the other. In fact, of all the rites of passage that religions have taken under their wing, that of sexual initiation has been by the most tenaciously adhered to. English people today look with incredulity on the habit in some Muslim communities of veiling and hiding women, of forcing them to marry the man chosen for them, and of occasionally killing them for 'honour's' sake. What can this possibly have to do with obedience to Allah, the compassionate, the merciful, they ask themselves? In fact, it has everything to do with it. Sex is not only the gateway through which the next generation enters the community; it is the place in which our actions are most unavoidably subject to the ethic of 'pollution and taboo'.”
― Roger Scruton, Our Church: A Personal History of the Church of England

“There is a term for those who triumph against the odds—for winners nobody saw coming. They are called dark horses.

The expression 'dark horse' first entered common parlance after the publication of The Young Duke in 1831. In this British novel, the title character bets on a horse race and loses big after the race is won by an unknown “dark horse, which had never been thought of.” The phrase quickly caught on. “Dark horse” came to denote an unexpected victor who had been overlooked because she did not fit the standard notion of a champion.

Ever since the term was coined, society has enjoyed a peculiar relationship with dark horses. By definition, we ignore them until they attain their success, at which point we are entertained and inspired by tales of their unconventional ascent. Even so, we rarely feel there is much to learn from them that we might profitably apply to our own lives, since their achievements often seem to rely upon haphazard spurts of luck.

We applaud the tenacity and pluck of a dark horse like Jennie or Alan, but the very improbability of their transformation—from fast-food server to planet-hunting astronomer, from blue-collar barkeep to upscale couturier— makes their journeys seem too exceptional to emulate. Instead, when we seek a dependable formula for success, we turn to the Mozarts, Warren Buffetts, and Tiger Woodses of the world. The ones everybody saw coming.”
― Todd Rose, Dark Horse: Achieving Success Through the Pursuit of Fulfillment