Quotes About Tradition

These people were well dressed in skins, had some guns, but armed generally with bows and arrows and such other instruments of war as are common among the Indians of the Missouri.

Neither Jewish morality nor Jewish tradition can be used to disallow terror as a means of war.

A love for tradition has never weakened a nation, indeed it has strengthened nations in their hour of peril.

I was drinking tea the other day, and I thought: they used to fight wars over this.

Back in the day, when the emperor or the king or whatever waged war, they went to war, too. But that's been lost in time.

Our top-down pyramid style of management is a very old concept borrowed from centuries of war and monarchies.

A samurai will use a toothpick even though he has not eaten. Inside the skin of a dog, outside the hide of a tiger.

All pity choked with custom of fell deeds.

The hospitality of the wigwam is only limited by the institution of war.

We should not forget that our tradition is one of protest and revolt, and it is stultifying to celebrate the rebels of the past ... while we silence the rebels of the present.

Girls would never do anything so unladylike as run, Norma explained. They would skip instead. And they would never, goodness gracious, sit so their skirts would hike up. Both boys and girls were taught respect for their elders, which included never interrupting or talking back to any adult. "I'm glad I didn't live back then," Catherine said (but not until later, when she wasn't interrupting anyone).

As the girls changed into their nineteenth-century sleepwear, they all agreed that the nightcaps should stay in the 1800s where they belonged.

I know that nobody who has grown up in a Jewish environment can ever be not-a-Jew, whether the Jewishness he experienced was defined by his family's sense of history, by its religious observances, or, indeed, by the environment's attitudes toward Jews.

They wonder if she was going to quilt it or just knot it! (The men laugh, the women look abashed.)

Who chose burial monuments? Were the wishes of the deceased taken into consideration? It was a subject I'd never considered before.

I've never been able to understand this generation's infatuation with using last names a first names.

The unwillingness to give a hearing to contradictory viewpoints, or to imagine that one might learn anything from an ideological or cultural opponent, represents a departure from the best side of American popular and elite intellectual traditions.

She was English, with all the characteristics that word implies.

They want you to know they care. They heard about Kasha. Besides, this is the Minnesota way. We demonstrate affection through hot dish.

Public memory: what every half-educated member of a culture knows in her sinews, for it seeped into them in ways she can hardly remember.

In Senegal, the polite expression for saying someone died is to say his or her library has burned.

The art critic and philosopher John Berger once said that we like to look at animals because it reminds us of the past and the  agrarian life that included the regular presence of animals.

Taking books away from a culture is to take away its shared memory.

understood how fundamental books were to Jewish culture, theology, and identity