Quotes About Tradition

A dead man sits on all our judgment seats; and living judges do but search out and repeat his decisions. We read in dead men's books! We laugh a dead men's jokes, and cry at dead men's pathos!

Tradition,—which sometimes brings down truth that history has let slip, but is oftener the wild babble of the time, such as was formerly spoken at the fireside and now congeals in newspapers,—tradition is responsible for all contrary averments.

It was as Hester said, in regard to the unwanted jollity that brightened the faces of the people. Into this festal season of the year - as it already was, and continued to be during the greater part of two centuries - the Puritans compressed whatever mirth and public joy they deemed allowable to human infirmity; thereby so far dispelling the customary cloud, that, for the space of a single holiday, they appeared scarcely more grave than most other communities at a period of general affliction.

The preposterous obstinacy of these honest people in persisting to groan and stumble along the difficult pathway rather than take advantage of modern improvements, excited great mirth among our wiser brotherhood.

If something was not in the scriptures, it was a man-made distortion of what God intended. At once radical and deeply conservative, the Puritans had chosen to spurn thousands of years of accumulated tradition in favor of a text that gave them a direct and personal connection to God.

What we require is not a formal return to tradition and religion, but a rereading, a reinterpretation, of our history that can illuminate the present and pave the way to a better future. For example, if we delve more deeply into ancient Egyptian and African civilisations we will discover the humanistic elements that were prevalent in many areas of life. Women enjoyed a high status and rights, which they later lost when class patriarchal society became the prevalent social system.

What Mayer did in the thirties? what he was situated to do as a Jew yearning to belong? was provide reassurance against the anxieties and disruptions of the time. He did this by fashioning a vast, compelling national fantasy out of his dreams and out of the basic tenets of his own dogmatic faith? a belief in virtue, in the bulwark of family, in the merits of loyalty, in the soundness of tradition, in America itself.

he had become the patriarch of horseflesh.

It made Disney at once a nostalgist and a futurist, a conservative and a visionary.

This is all a little theatrical, don't you think?" Greyson commented. "Ah, but theater is the hallmark of ritual, and ritual is the touchstone of religion," Mendoza responded.

THE OLD GUARD AND THE NEW ORDER

A scythe's journal is traditionally made of lambskin parchment and kid leather." "I assume you mean 'kid' as in 'goat,'" Rowan said, "and not 'kid' as in 'kid.

Comfort food, thought Citra, because somehow it made her feel safe from the inside out. "My grandmother said it could actually heal a cold." "What's a cold?" asked Citra. "A deadly illness from the mortal age, I suppose.

Washington was still a place to be respected, but only in the way that we respect crumbling antiquity.

Unable to suppress love, the Church wanted at least to disinfect it, and it created marriage.

New Year's Eve is like any other eve to me: I drink.

Vaya sorpresa que te vas a llevar, amigo... ¡cuando descubras que nosotros los viejos retrógrados queremos también un mundo mejor! ¡sólo que no somos partidarios de QUEMAR la casa para librarnos de las termitas!

I had read that more people committed suicide on Christmas Eve and on Christmas Day than at any other time. The holiday had little or nothing to do with the Birth of Christ, apparently.

How could these hierarchical, acquisitive, market-oriented, monotheistic, ethnocentric newcomers have absorbed ideas and customs from the egalitarian, reciprocal, noncapitalistic, pantheistic, ethnocentric natives? The

Almost all that can be known with certainty about this initial group is that it belonged to a diverse, four-thousand-year-old tradition characterized by the construction of large earthen mounds. Based around the Mississippi and its associated rivers, these societies scattered tens of thousands of mounds from southern Canada and the Great Plains to the Atlantic coast and the Gulf of Mexico. They were especially concentrated in the Ohio Valley, but nearly as many are found in the Southeast.

For aught known to the contrary, the good farmers of Yorkshire are, in a great measure, indebted to the bones of their children for their daily bread.

Having grown separately for millennia, the [orginal] Americans were a boundless sea of novel ideas, drea,s, stories, philosophies, religions, ,oralities, discoveries, and all other products of the mind....Here and there we see clues of what might have been. Pacific Northwest Indian artists carved beautiful masks, boxes, bas-relief S, and totem poles within the dictates of an elaborate aesthetic syste, based on an ovoid shapes that has no name in European languages.

Almost everyone agreed that the new name was a big improvement, logically speaking. Unfortunately, nobody used it. Not for the first time in Native American history, the confusing, incorrect name prevailed.

These old forests, called fallows, have traditionally been classified as high forest (pristine forest on well-drained ground) by Western researchers," Balée wrote in 2003. But they "would not exist" without "human agricultural activities.