Values Dissonance/Quotes

With those who follow a different Way it is useless to take counsel.

—Confucius

And she kept calling the Indians niggers for some reason, so I said "No, no, no, it's the West Indians who are niggers. These people are Wogs.

—Major Gowen, who didn't have N-Word Privileges, on taking a girl to watch cricket.

It's funny to think how we listen to Yellow Submarine in kindergarten, when in reality all four of the Beatles were high as shit when they wrote it. But that's ok, because unlike now, drugs weren't used to be cool, but to expand your mind (aka Jerry Garcia.)

—Urban Dictionary on The Beatles

Ivan Dobsky: Look out, Mr. Drummond! It's Nelson Bonjela, the most feared terrorist in all of South Africa!
Mr. Drummond: It would be best if you just reversed all your 1970's preconceptions, Ivan.

—Monkey Dust

"I hope that, like Mark Twain, people one day look back at my work and say, 'Wow, that is actually pretty racist.'"

—Tina Fey, in her acceptance speech for the Mark Twain award

"It is different, yeah. It's a different morality, get used to it, or go home."

—The Ninth Doctor, Doctor Who

It is interesting that every country seems to have its own, most often irrational, opinion which type of behavior is a big no-no and which isn’t. In Germany prostitution is completely legal, but proving yourself to be an idiot by saying that the holocaust didn’t happen can land you in prison.

—The Rant of this Sandra and Woo, summing up the trope in two sentences.

"When many of us sit down and play titles that come out of Japan, we are specifically playing them because they are nothing like what we can get here. They often touch on subjects which are considered taboo to some western audiences, or tackle subject matter that others are afraid to tread through. We don't play Japanese games [...] because they are representative of our western cultural values, we play them because they aren't. They allow us to grow by experiencing fiction and fun from the point of view of an entirely different culture, and we learn a new form of appreciation for the world through it."

—Mandatory Fun, Change.org petition (1 Million Gamers Strong for Japanese Gaming)

Have you ever seen an old photo of yourself and been embarrassed at the way you looked? Did we actually dress like that? We did. And we had no idea how silly we looked. It's the nature of fashion to be invisible, in the same way the movement of the earth is invisible to all of us riding on it.
What scares me is that there are moral fashions too. They're just as arbitrary, and just as invisible to most people. But they're much more dangerous. Fashion is mistaken for good design; moral fashion is mistaken for good. Dressing oddly gets you laughed at. Violating moral fashions can get you fired, ostracized, imprisoned, or even killed.

—What You Can't Say by Paul Graham