Quotes About Tradition

Sauer's checkered stock

To keep people dependent on the church for their entire lifetime, create more sacraments.

It was Klan custom, for instance, to append a Kl to many words. (Thus would two Klansmen hold a Klonversation in the local Klavern.)

is still common for a bride's parents to give the groom or his family cash, cars, or real estate. The

A great deal of conventional wisdom is built on nothing more than a story that someone has been telling for so long—often out of self-interest—that it is treated like gospel.

It should also be noted that many girls' names, including Shirley, Carol, Leslie, Hilary, Renee, Stacy, and Tracy began life as boys' names, but girls' names almost never cross over to boys.)

Young women in Cameroon have their breasts "ironed"—beaten or massaged by a wooden pestle or a heated coconut shell—to make them less sexually tempting.

We have a natural tendency to romanticize breakthrough innovations, imagining momentous ideas transcending their surroundings, a gifted mind somehow seeing over the detritus of old ideas and ossified tradition. But ideas are works of bricolage; they're built out of that detritus.

The tradition of the commonplace book contains a central tension between order and chaos, between the desire for methodical arrangement, and the desire for surprising new links of association.

As has been said about science, sometimes society advances funeral by funeral.47

Religion thrives on woolly allegory, emotional commitments to texts that no one reads, and other forms of benign hypocrisy.

Aristocratic, religious, and martial cultures have always looked down on commerce as tawdry and venal.

What could be more fundamental to our sense of meaning and purpose than a conception of whether the strivings of the human race over long stretches of time have left us better or worse off? How, in particular, are we to make sense of modernity—of the erosion of family, tribe, tradition, and religion by the forces of individualism, cosmopolitanism, reason, and science?

santa-shmanta n. The explanation Jewish children get for why they celebrate Hanukkah while the rest of the neighbors celebrate Christmas.

Una civilización optimista está abierta a la innovación y no la teme, y se basa en las tradiciones de la crítica.

The authors of Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage, having surveyed the uses of the two forms over six hundred years, conclude, "The traditional rules about shall and will do not appear to have described real usage of these words precisely at any time, although there is no question that they do describe the usage of some people some of the time and that they are more applicable in England than elsewhere.

our own susceptibility to illusions and fallacies, tell us that men and women are fallible. One therefore ought to seek good reasons for believing something. Faith, revelation, tradition, dogma, authority, the ecstatic glow of subjective certainty—all are recipes for error, and should be dismissed as sources of knowledge.

The essence of a culture of honor is that it does not sanction predatory or instrumental violence, but only retaliation after an insult or other mistreatment.

Is it your conviction that small-town life, centered on church, tradition, and fear of God, is our best bulwark against murder and mayhem? Well, think again. As Europe became more urban, cosmopolitan, commercial, industrialized, and secular, it got safer and safer. And that brings us back to the ideas of Norbert Elias, the only theory left standing. Elias

The history of human folly, and our own susceptibility to illusions and fallacies, tells us that men and women are fallible. One therefore ought to seek good reasons for believing something. Faith, revelation, tradition, dogma, authority, the ecstatic glow of subjective certainty - all are recipes for error, and should be dismissed as sources of knowledge.

I love the Christmas-tide, and yet, I notice this, each year I live; I always like the gifts I get, But how I love the gifts I give!

Every July, I look forward to taping a Christmas show - in July in Nashville. In 98-degree weather. I love it.

I still love the whole history of jazz. The old things sound better than ever.

But let my due feet never fail To walk the studious cloisters pale, And love the high embowed roof, With antique pillars massy proof, And storied windows richly dight; Casting a dim religious light.