Quotes About Tradition

My mother died when I was 18. Up until then, I never saw a tin can in my house. (Washington Post interview, 1990)

In our village back home, marriages were always between people who had known each other their whole lives. And all the boys I had known were dead. So I thought I would never get married. I thought I could never marry someone I hadn't known from when I was a child.

Así funciona la cabeza de mamá: los hombres en general, y nuestro padre en particular, llevan las riendas de las cosas. Pero en el fondo, en la penumbra, las mujeres disponemos de una sanción final, de una palabra inapelable. Si el clan por algún motivo está en peligro y los hombres, en su ceguera consuetudinaria, en su simpleza ramplona, no advierten el riesgo, somos nosotras las que debemos intervenir.

Orthodoxy is a relaxation of the mind accompanied by a stiffening of the heart.

Vonnegut is one of America's basic artists, a true and worthy heir to the grand tradition of Thoreau, Whitman, Twain, Dreiser, Traven, Tom Wolfe (the real Tom Wolfe, I mean) and Steinbeck. In other words, he writes out of a concern for justice, love, honesty, and hope.

To make the distinction unmistakably clear: Civilization is the vital force in human history; culture is that inert mass of institutions and organizations which accumulate around and tend to drag down the advance of life; Civilization is Giordano Bruno facing death by fire; culture is the Cardinal Bellarmino, after ten years of inquisition, sending Bruno to the stake in the Campo di Fiori...

Keep it like it was.

Proverbs save us the trouble of thinking. What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.

It is always unsafe to detach a custom from its hold on past events, treating it as an isolated fact to be simply disposed of by some plausible explanation.

the moral views now associated in the secularist mind with superstition and ignorance in fact follow inexorably from a consistent application of the metaphysical ideas we've traced back through Aquinas and the other Scholastic thinkers to Plato and Aristotle, the very greatest of the Greek founders of the Western intellectual tradition.

Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue.

Full of Eastern promise.

Colorful candles burning bright, each lit on eight very special nights.

Grandmas don't just say "that's nice" — they reel back and roll their eyes and throw up their hands and smile. You get your money's worth out of grandmas.

Grandfathers are for loving and fixing things.

Witch and ghost make merry on this last of dear OctoberÂ's days.

I'll bet living in a nudist colony takes all the fun out of Halloween.

Mordecai rent his clothes, and put on sackcloth with ashes.

A proverb and a byword among all people.

This day [Passover] shall be unto you for a memorial; and ye shall keep it a feast to the Lord throughout your generations.

Something old, something new,Something borrowed, something blue,And a lucky sixpence in her shoe.

There's no place like home... except Grandma's.

Give me that old-time religion,It's good enough for me.

Through the years we all will be together,If the Fates allow.Hang a shining star upon the highest bough,And have yourself a merry little Christmas now.