Quotes About Tradition

Tradition is a pretty poor excuse for perpetrating stereotypes.

Ancestor worship is not alone the exotic preoccupation of quaint people mired in superstition in some remote corner of the world. Larger-than-life evidence of its industrialized-world variants can be seen in virtually every public park in America.

We, like others, need to define ourselves, to place our lives in a long-term linear intergenerational context. We, like others, need to celebrate ourselves by seeing ourselves celebrated. We, like others, need to stare at objects that can help us discover reflections of ourselves in an idealized past. That's really what it's all about, isn't it? Remembering. The human's innate need to remember one's self before one's own time.

Civilization as well as civility thrive where there is a pot of beer.

Thousands of years and many civilizations have defined a marriage as the union between one man and one woman. With few exceptions, those civilizations that did not follow that perished.

Jim Graham] had been a linebacker at Penn State, and was seriously old-school. I mean, really old-school; like he thought the forward pass was a trick play.

It is the little platoons, rather than the great society, which command attention in this new version of the national past; the spirit of place rather than that of the common law or the institutions of representative government.

My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a Land Rover, his son will drive a Land Rover, but his son will ride a camel.

I pretty much borrow my entire beauty regime from my mom.

I know my mom said as early as she can remember letting me watch TV, my one treat a week when I was like 6 was to stay up and watch 'Saturday Night Live.'

In our culture we have such respect for musical instruments, they are like part of God.

The God-fearing, churchgoing farmers are all gone. Now they all have TVs on their roofs and orgies in their barns. The flux, Fly, man, the flux of time. If everything goes tits up, there's always the farm and the cows...

It's also a time-honored, hardwired tradition for children to not want what their parents push on them.

Modernity sees humanity as having ascended from what is inferior to it—life begins in slime and ends in intelligence—whereas traditional cultures see it as descended from its superiors. As the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins puts the matter: "We are the only people who assume that we have ascended from apes. Everybody else takes it for granted that they are descended from gods." —HUSTON SMITH16 Some philosophers hold

Tea: was there ever a more universal and life-sustaining beverage.

This traditional woman grew up in a world where respect for the animals hunted was of paramount importance. A concept that, in many cases, differentiates the native from the non-native hunter.

using drumming. Once found, the shaman would sing a magic song to hold the caribou in that place until the hunters could intercept them.

The devastating effects of diseases and parasites relating to sanitation—dysentery, typhoid fever, typhus, lice, scabies—might have been reduced had the Continental Army paid more attention to the traditionally female job of maintaining adequate hygiene. Since men died of disease as often as they died in battle, the failure to take preventative measures must be counted as a military liability.

My dear dead mother wanted me to go into an honorable trade, like grave robbing. Would I listen? No. Be an assassin, like your uncle Gustav, she said. Would I pay heed? No. Apprentice to the Necromancer?

And so, for me, the only fiction that still means something today is the kind of fiction that tries to explore the possibilities of fiction beyond its own limitations; the kind of fiction that challenges the tradition that governs it; the kind of fiction that constantly renews our faith in man's intelligence and imagination rather than man's distorted view of reality; the kind of fiction that reveals man's playful irrationality rather than his righteous rationality.

It's amazing, isn't it? Here we are, two thousand years later, with everything we've accomplished, everything we know, and yet this little talisman still rules the way billions of people live…and die.

A lot of people are open to new things, as long as they look like the old ones.

The German word for tatting is Schiffchenarbeit meaning 'the work of the little boat

The struggle between Jews and zombies would drag on, itself zombie-like, unless they found a way to pass beyond Jews and Zombies. The future. She was the future. New blood, and a new beginning. Breaking the old wheel of tradition. Helix and double-helix, and the doubling was a necessary part of the helix. She