Quotes About Tradition

The Yale anthropologist Weston La Barre goes far as to argue that `a surprisingly good case could be made that much of culture is hallucination` and that `the whole intent and function of ritual appears to be... a group wish to hallucinate reality`.

If scientists can be fooled on the question of the simple interpretation of straightforward data of the sort that they are routinely obtaining from other kinds of astronomical objects, when the stakes are high, when the emotional predispositions are working, what must be the situation where the evidence is much weaker, where the will to believe is much greater, where the skeptical scientific tradition has hardly made a toehold - namely, in the area of religion?

loved to go and make fun of the homecoming

What once was and was good ought not to be cast aside.

tricornered headdress.

Reynolds Lucius Wadsworth III was Waddy's real name, the result of a three-generation tradition of unparalleled cruelty in the naming of first-born boys.

Like all the best radical positions, then, mine is a thoroughly traditionalist one.

Marx himself was a formidably cultivated man in the great central European tradition, who longed to be finished with what he scathingly called the 'economic crap' of Capital in order to write his big book on Balzac.

Alienation, the "commodification" of social life, a culture of greed, aggression, mindless hedonism and growing nihilism, the steady haemorrhage of meaning and value from human existence: it is hard to find an intelligent discussion of these questions that is not seriously indebted to the Marxist tradition.

To relate a Beethoven sonata to the testicles is hardly in the style of traditional aesthetics.

What I admire about Austen (among hundreds of other commendable qualities) is her traditional rather than modern conception of morality. She sees it, as did Aristotle, Aquinas, and Marx, as a matter of public conduct, not as the inner light, interior emotions, what you happen to be feeling, what you find aesthetically alluring, and the like. She's an extremely tough-minded ethical realist in an increasingly corrupt, sentimentalist culture.

Brewing was often viewed as an appropriate activity for widows, who found it hard to farm land.

The situation was rather like that of the mid-twentieth century, when the old vaudeville comedians – with their distinctive repertoire of hand-me-down material culled from many years of touring music halls – found themselves displaced by the university-educated satirists of the television age who wrote their own fresh material every week.

D. G. Hart, in his book Recovering Mother Kirk, rightly urges Presbyterians 'to abandon the notion of the church as personal trainer' and to recover 'Calvin's idea of the church as mother.' 9

Granny was an old-fashioned witch. She didn't do good for people, she did right by them.

OH, THERE HAS TO BE SOMETHING IN THE STOCKING THAT MAKES A NOISE, said Death. OTHERWISE, WHAT IS 4:30 A.M. FOR?

You did something because it had always been done, and the explanation was, 'But we've always done it this way.' A million dead people can't have been wrong, can they?

This, milord, is my family's axe. We have owned it for almost nine hundred years, see. Of course, sometimes it needed a new blade. And sometimes it has required a new handle, new designs on the metalwork, a little refreshing of the ornamentation . . . but is this not the nine hundred-year-old axe of my family? And because it has changed gently over time, it is still a pretty good axe, y'know. Pretty good.

The girls were expected to grow up to be somebody's wife. They were also expected to read and write, those being considered soft indoor jobs that were too fiddly for the boys.

Voodoo is a very interesting religion for the whole family, even those members of it who are dead.

A number of religions in Ankh-Morpork still practiced human sacrifice, except that they didn't really need to practice any more because they had got so good at it.

You can't trust folk songs. They always sneak up on you.

The calendar of the Theocracy of Muntab counts down, not up. No-one knows why, but it might not be a good idea to hang around and find out.

Of all the forces in the universe, the hardest to overcome is the force of habit.