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Quote by Octavia Yvonne Webb

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Mixed Bloodline: The story of a young biracial boy overcoming racism growing up in the South doing the 1930's Jim Crow Era

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Octavia Yvonne Webb

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“Do you act the same in society as you do in private? Do you speak to everyone the same way?" "No, no quite," I replied, wincing. "Of course. No one does. You put on one disguise for society. You put on another for your sister. For your parents. Your customer the other night." I felt my face warm. "But what about in private? Anyone can be themselves then without--ah! Ow!-- without putting on an act." “We do not remain the same each minute to the next. Every word you hear, every sight you see, every smell, every thought you have, every moment—it all changes you. We keep putting on mask after mask, layers over layers. That’s how one grows.”

SocietyMasksBehaviors
Book:These Vicious Masks
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“I suppose that our intent is good. But sadly, our wisdom is short. For to seek the feeble constraints of any sort of crafted legislation (despite how ingeniously crafted it might be) as a means of reigning in the horrors of our world is similar to an attempt to build a dam sufficient to hold back the whole of the ocean. And I would contend that that seems to be something of a fool’s errand born of our desire to bury our heads in the legislative sand rather than peer into the darkness of men’s hearts. For we must change the hearts of men if we are to alter their actions. And if we are to do that with any kind of effectiveness at all, we must start in the hardest place imaginable…and that is in the heart that lays inside of us.”

PoliticalPoliticsChangeTransformationActionsLegislationHeartsBehaviorsSelf AnalysisHorrors
Author:Craig D. Lounsbrough
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“At any rate, the principles of a noble manner of life and the ethics of the nobility now take on the clear and uncompromising form known to us from the chivalric epic and lyric. We often find the new members of a privileged group to be more rigorous in their attitude to questions of class etiquette than the born representatives of the group; they are more clearly conscious of the ideas which hold the particular group together and distinguish it from other groups than are men who grew up in those ideas. This is a well-known and often-repeated feature of social history; the novus homo is always inclined to over-compensate for his sense of inferiority and to emphasize the moral qualifications required for the privileges which he enjoys. In the present case, too, we find that the knights who have risen from the ranks of the retainers are stricter and more intolerant in matters of honour than the old aristocrats by birth. What seems to the latter a matter of course, something that could hardly be otherwise than what it is, appears to the newly ennobled an achievement and a problem. The feeling of belonging to the governing class, one of which the old nobility had scarcely been conscious, is for them a great new experience. Where the old-style aristocrat acts instinctively and makes no pretensions about it, the knight finds himself faced with a special task of difficulty, an opportunity for heroic action, a need to surpass himself—in fact to do something extraordinary and unnatural. In matters in which a born grand seigneur takes no trouble to distinguish himself from the rest of mankind, the new knight requires of his peers that they should at all costs show themselves different from ordinary mortals.”

NobleKnightsEtiquetteAristocracyChivalryBehaviorsMoral CodesThe Established And Outsiders
Book:The Social History of Art, Volume 1: From Prehistoric Times to the Middle Ages
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