“Normal is the average of deviance.”

— Rita Mae Brown, book Venus Envy

Venus Envy (1993)

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Rita Mae Brown38

Novelist, poet, screenwriter, activist 1944

Henry S. Haskins (1875–1957)

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p.135

“There is no such thing as an average human being. If you have a normal brain, you are superior.”

Ben Carson (1951) 17th and current United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development; American neurosurgeon

“Every normal person, in fact, is only normal on the average. His ego approximates to that of the psychotic in some part or other and to a greater or lesser extent.”

Sigmund Freud book The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud

Analysis Terminable and Interminable, sect. 5 (1937); reprinted in Complete Works, Standard Edition, vol. 23 (ed. James Strachey and Anna Freud. 1964); as quoted in The New Penguin Dictionary of Modern Quotations by Robert Andrews, Penguin Books, 2001.
1930s

“The theory of democratic government is not that the will of the people is always right, but rather that normal human beings of average intelligence will, if given a chance, learn the right and best course by bitter experience.”

W.E.B. Du Bois book The Negro

Source: The Negro (1915), Ch. XI: The Negro in the United States

“It goes without saying that the normal durability of fixed capital is calculated on the supposition that all the conditions under which it can perform its functions normally during that time are fulfilled, just as we assume, in placing a mans life at 30 years on the average, that he will wash himself.”

Karl Marx book Das Kapital

Source: Das Kapital (Buch II) (1893)

“What social and industrial research has not sufficiently realised as yet is that… minor irrationalities of the “average normal” person are cumulative in their effect. They may not cause “breakdown” in the individual but they do cause “breakdown” in the industry.”

Elton Mayo (1880–1949) Australian academic

Elton Mayo, “Irrationalty and Revery”, Journal of Personnel Research, March 1933, p.482; Cited in: Ionescu, G.G., & A.L. Negrusa. "Elton Mayo, an Enthusiastical Managerial Philosopher." Revista de Management Comparat International 14.5 (2013): 671.

“It is easily observable that different groups judge different things to be deviant. This should alert us to the possibility that the person making the judgment of deviance, the process by which that judgment is arrived at, and the situation in which it is made may all be intimately involved in the phenomenon of deviance. To the degree that the common-sense view of deviance and the scientific theories that begin with its premises assume that acts that break rules are inherently deviant and thus take for granted the situations and processes of judgment, they may leave out an important variable.”

Howard S. Becker (1928) American sociologist

Source: Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance (1963), p. 4.

“What's next? Orgy rooms? Menage a trois rooms? All this coedness is outside normal life. Most average American adults don't use coed bathrooms — if they had the option of a coed bathroom at a public restaurant, they wouldn't choose it.”

Christine O'Donnell (1969) American Tea Party politician and former Republican Party candidate

Taming Animal House; Students find ways to keep morals in college life.
2003-09-18
Washington Times
http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-3130739/Taming-Animal-House-Students-find.html
on coed dormitory rooms

“I welcome each new day with a hopeful expectancy that I, too, will rise above the ordinary. For I am not content to live a merely "normal" life or settle for an average existence. No, I am destined for more--much, much more.”

Melody Carlson (1956) American writer

Source: Finding Alice

“That man is a creature who needs order yet yearns for change is the creative contradiction at the heart of the laws which structure his conformity and define his deviancy.”

Freda Adler (1934) Criminologist, educator

Source: Sisters in Crime: The Rise of the New Female Criminal (1975), P. 171.

“Normal is the average of deviance.”

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Rita Mae Brown38

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