Quotes About Tradition

What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest

Our town was known for two things--no, three: salted fish, expertly dyed fabrics, and corruption.

Each house has its own signature, unknown to all except the grown children who go back to visit.

It was funny how the old practices always came around again. It was the rhythm of human enterprise to invent and worship some new approach, to fully reject it a generation later, to realize the need for it again a generation or two after that and then hastily reinvent it as new, usually without its original elegance. Scientists hated to look backward for anything.

Lena studied the faces of the girls on the sidelines. She could tell that Kostos owned the lust of what few local teenage girls there were in Oia, but instead he chose to dance with all the grandmothers, all the women who had raised him, who had poured into him the love they couldn't spend on their own absent children and grandchildren.

The theories of the French revolutionaries, as summarized by historian Roger Hancock, were founded on respect for no humanity except that which they proposed to create. In order to liberate mankind from tradition, the revolutionaries were ready to make him altogether the creature of a new society, to reconstruct his very humanity to meet the demands of the general will.

Women were expected to wait and learn about sex from their husbands, who would bring their sexual experience to the marriage. I've never quite figured out how that was supposed to be mathematically possible, but presumably the theory was that the future husbands gained their experience with a few bad girls who were not marriage material and who were having sex with the majority of the male population.

I felt joined to all the men and women across cultures down through the ages who'd done something useful with their hands, who'd made essential things from whatever was in front of them.

pin-the-feather-on-the-turkey

Myriah and Gabbie jumped up from the table. We know White Christmas, said Myriah. And I'll Be Home for Christmas. Claudia was surprised. They did? What about the simple songs like Jingle Bells or Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer? But the Perkins girls know a lot of long, grown-up songs, and sure enough they knew both of these word for word. They performed them with hand motions and everything.

She thought of Mama making dresses for her and Rose because handmade was cheaper than store bought

Christmas books.

Mohawk Indians are part of the large Iroquois nation. And the Iroquois Indians lived in longhouses, not teepees.

even wore something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue.

The crime of host desecration was punished throughout Europe for centuries.

Words like "God" and "Allah" must go the way of "Apollo" and "Baal," or they will unmake our world.

House of Islam

Well, let's make it simpler. Let's say we found a culture on an island somewhere that was removing the eyeballs of every third child. Would you then agree that we had found a culture that was not perfectly maximizing human well-being?

From the perspective of faith, it is better to ape the behaviour of one's ancestors than to find creative ways to uncover new truths in the present.

The soul discerns what is true, independent of any tradition, institution, or book. Our religions are storehouses of secondhand insights, useful for inspiration but harmful when substituted for firsthand communion with the divine soul.  To the religiously devout, this may seem like a dangerous, revolutionary idea. But really, the truth of the soul is the oldest of revelations.

John the Baptist wasn't Catholic. He was the very first Baptist—everybody knows that." Sarah shook her head. "They called him 'the Baptist' because he baptized people, silly." I tapped my fingers on the table. "He swore off women, refused decent food and clothing, and was always yelling at people to repent. If that isn't Baptist, I don't know what is.

when I chaired meetings in 2009 to consider whether our administration should take a fresh position on something, I often heard one of two entrenched views: We never do that, or We always do that. The past was prologue: those who had conceived of policies in a certain way were ill disposed to try something new.

ACCUSTOMANCE  (ACCU'STOMANCE)   n.s.[accoûtumance, Fr.]Custom, habit, use. Through accustomance and negligence, and perhaps some other causes, we neither feel it in our own bodies, nor take notice of it in others.Boyle'sWorks.

Ou is frequently used in the last syllable of words which in Latin end in or and are made English, as honour, labour, favour, from honor, labor, favor. Some late innovators have ejected the u, without considering that the last syllable gives the sound neither of or nor ur, but a sound between them, if not compounded of both; besides that they are probably derived to us from the French nouns in eur, as honeur, faveur.