Quotes About Tradition

The Italian landscape has always harmonized the vulgar and the Vitruvian: the contorni around the duomo, the portiere'S laundry across the padrone's portone, Supercortemaggiore against the Romanesque apse. Naked children have never played in our fountains, and I. M. Pei will never be happy on Route 66.

Sacrifice requires perfect awareness of destruction: if this clear-sighted attention is missing, there is no sacrifice. For technology it's enough to justify with claims about its practical utility.

Computers will have to learn that when I quote from some old author who spelled differently from the machine, the wishes of the long-dead author will have to be respected, and the machine will have to mind its manners

Are you New World or Old?' 'Sounds like a novel by Henry James.' 'Never read him.' 'Don't. But that was his question and he plumped for the Old.

However much science and educational theory and advanced thinking you pump into a college or a university, it always retains a strong hint of its medieval origins.

He came of a generation to which any girl, before she is married, is a kind of unexploded bomb.

It is a bad thing to forsake the old ways, and what is once lost can never quite be recovered." (Briggs

And so the war was fought with new weapons and old ideas and the result was a slaughter exceeding that of any previous war. In just four years, about 9,300,000 soldiers died on the battlefields of the Great War; 3,600,000 from the nations comprising the Central Powers and 5,700,000 from the nations of the Entente.

So, Art [Green] said, it's hard to do Judaism and travel light. Judaism is not mostly about letting go, but mostly about attachment to God, through attachment to tradition, attachment to forms.

the Romans knew of the watermill but made nearly no use of it, continuing to rely on muscle power to grind their flour.20 The Ottoman Empire prohibited the mechanical clock, and so did the Chinese.

Humans will tend to adopt and retain those elements of culture that appear to produce "better" results, while those that appear to be less rewarding will tend to be discarded.

paganism was "no more than a spongy mass of tolerance and tradition."3

The reason so many innovations and inventions were abandoned or even outlawed in China had to do with Confucian opposition to change on grounds that the past was greatly superior.

For there is another truth: to the extent that other cultures have failed to adopt at least major aspects of Western ways, they remain backward and impoverished.

In Egypt: Under no conditions, under threat of death could anyone kill a cat. People were exceuted for even killing a cat accidentally. And when a cat died, the whole family, and probably their closest friends, went into mourning, the measure of their personal loss signalled by their shaving off their eyebrows.

because an American can have a double-barreled last name but there is little practice for a triple-barreled one.

There are many American conservatives, including those influenced by the Roman Catholic tradition of natural law philosophy, who believe that, in the end, the conservative position rests on theological foundations.

In discussing tradition, we are not discussing arbitrary rules and conventions. We are discussing answers that have been discovered to enduring questions. These

We've got to stand up not only for free speech, but also for all that we've inherited from the Enlightenment and from Christianity.

The Anglo-American tradition of constitutional thinking should be understood in this way, as addressing the question of how to limit the power of government, without losing its benefits. That

It is to overlook the culture that has focused, down the centuries, on the business of repentance.

A reactionary is fixed on the past and wanting to return to it; a conservative wishes to adapt what is best in the past to the changing circumstances of the present.

Many accuse conservatism of being no more than a highly-wrought work of mourning, a translation into the language of politics of the yearning for childhood that lies deep in us all.

While it may have been true at the end of the nineteenth century to describe the Anglican Church as the Tory Party at prayer, it would be more correct to say, of its leaders today, that they represent the Labour Party trying to remember how to pray, while not really understanding the point of it.