Quotes About Tradition

in my grandfather's premodern world, how he wanted to live was his choice, and the family's role was to make it possible.

The veneration of elders may be gone, but not because it has been replaced by veneration of youth. It's been replaced by veneration of the independent self.

Baseball players, for example, are notoriously superstitious.

Self-preservation starts very early in West Indian families.

Men så uppdök minnet om gamla fäderneförmaningar och råd, och då framkom den gamla lögnen, att allt arbete är lika aktningsvärt och förehöll honom hans högmod, och så tog han sitt förnuft till fånga och gick hem för att skriva 48 verktum Ulrika Eleonora.

I just want to come and sit on your front porch and drink mint juleps.

Thanksgiving was nothing more than a pilgrim-created obstacle in the way of Christmas; a dead bird in the street that forced a brief detour.

As a young child I had Santa and Jesus all mixed up. I could identify Coke or Pepsi with just one sip, but I could not tell you for sure why they strapped Santa to a cross. Had he missed a house? Had a good little girl somewhere in the world not received the doll he'd promised her, making the father angry?" (p.3)

Olives are the wishbones of the cocktail world; rarely are they freely passed along to somebody else.

While there is wisdom in refraining from implementing change merely for the sake of change, clinging to old ways solely for the sake of their antiquity is obviously equally futile.

I have, let's say, sixty years to live. Most of that time will be spent working. I've chosen the work I want to do. If I find no joy in it, then I'm only condemning myself to sixty years of torture. And I can find the joy only if I do my work in the best way possible to me. But the best is a matter of standards—and I set my own standards. I inherit nothing. I stand at the end of no tradition. I may, perhaps, stand at the beginning of one.

Certainly, all of us at Callahan's were heir to the tradition of the B-movie — and the A-movie for that matter — that any female who enters your life in a dramatic manner must be your fated love.

También en este punto el modelo procedía de arriba: las parejas dirigentes vivían frecuentemente separadas155. Estaba mal visto que una madre dedicase demasiado tiempo a su hijo, incluso pequeño. Se anuló la autoridad de los maridos sobre sus mujeres y de los padres sobre su descendencia. Uno podía ser ejecutado por haber abofeteado a la esposa, ser denunciado por los hijos por haberles pegado

Cleopatra descended from a long line of murderers and faithfully upheld the family tradition but was, for her time and place, remarkably well behaved.

For three months of the year they could not be certain what year they were living in. Because the pope approved the Gregorian calendar, New England rejected it, stubbornly continuing to date the start of the new year to March 25.

If something foreign arrives at Paris, they either think they invented it, or that it has always been there. —Horace Walpole

Tomorrow he'd see Meg, just as his Luddite ancestor met the hangman.

Who we are takes generations to create and doesn't end with death.

There have always been Starkadders at Cold Comfort Farm

As all these barriers to single living and personal autonomy gradually eroded, society's ability to pressure people into marrying, or keep them in a marriage against their wishes, was drastically curtailed. People no longer needed to marry in order to construct successful lives or long-lasting sexual relationships. With that, thousands of years of tradition came to an end.

The cultural consensus that everyone should marry and form a male breadwinner family was like a steamroller that crushed every alternative view. By the end of the 1950s even people who had grown up in completely different family systems had come to believe that universal marriage at a young age into a male breadwinner family was the traditional and permanent form of marriage.

Whenever people propose that we go back to the traditional family, I always suggest that they pick a ballpark date for the family they have in mind. Once pinned down, they are invariably unwilling to accept the package deal that comes with their chosen model.

Certainly people fell in love during those thousands of years, sometimes with their own spouses. But marriage was not fundamentally about love. It was too vital an economic and political institution to be entered into solely on the basis of something as irrational as love.

On the North American plains in the 1930s, a Kiowa Indian woman commented to a researcher that "a woman can always get another husband, but she has only one brother.