Quotes About Tradition

Its body was carved with men and pythons and little steps were cut on one side; without these the drummer could not climb to the top to beat it. When the Ikolo was beaten for war it was decorated with skulls won in past wars. But now it sang of peace.

he was as good as any young man, or better because young men were no longer what they used to be.

Was it not a common saying among his people that a man should not, out of pride and etiquette, swallow his phlegm?

Okonkwo never showed any emotion openly, unless it be the emotion of anger. To show affection was a sign of weakness; the only thing worth demonstrating was strength.

Dicen nuestros mayores que el sol ha de alumbrar antes a los que están de pie que a los que se arrodillan bajo ellos.

The Igbo are a very democratic people. The Igbo people expressed a strong antimonarchy sentiment—Ezebuilo—which literally means, a king is an enemy.

That night the Mother of the Spirits walked the length and breadth of the clan, weeping for her murdered son. It was a terrible night. Not even the oldest man in Umuofia had ever heard such a strange and fearful sound, and it was never to be heard again. It seemed as if the very soul of the tribe wept for a great evil that was coming—its own death.

The young he-goat said that but his sojourn in his mother's clan he would not have learnt to stick up his upper lip.

In our custom a man is not expected to go down on his knees and knock his forehead on the ground to his wife to ask her forgiveness or beg a favor. But, a wise man knows that between him and his wife there may arise the need for him to say to her in secret: I beg you.

When a tradition gathers enough strength to go on for centuries, you don't just turn it off one day.

Chinua Achebe (Author)

Thomas Paine is America's single great revolutionary theorist. We have produced a slew of admirable anarchists (Alexander Berkman, Emma Goldman, Dorothy Day, and Noam Chomsky), and radical leaders have arisen out of oppressed groups (Sitting Bull, Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Fannie Lou Hamer, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Cornel West, and bell hooks). But we do not have a tradition of revolutionists. This makes Paine unique.

We are not a people with a revolutionary or an insurrectionary tradition. The War of Independence, while it borrowed the rhetoric of revolution, replaced a foreign oligarchy with a native, slaveholding oligarchy.

Say what you will about 'Miracle on 34th Street'; I can take my grandchildren to it. If I had a maiden aunt, I could take her, or my ma and pa if they were alive.

I like the sentimentality of 'Miracle on 34th Street' and all those movies, and there actually is a tradition of Christmas comedies, too.

There is a big misconception about arranged marriage. Yes, it can mean that you meet someone and then have to marry them, but this was my mother saying, 'I'm going to introduce you to so-and-so - If you don't like them, fair enough.'

I've never missed a single Christmas with my parents.

My mom's collard greens. No one else in the world can make them like hers. I'm not just saying that because she's my mom. She's got some Mississippi secret. I could seriously eat them every day.

Missouri has a rich history and diverse heritage that deserves a proper celebration.

In a bar mitzvah, you do the candle-lighting ceremony with the cake. Every birthday, the cake is the big moment.

I went to Hebrew school but opted out of a bar mitzvah.

My bar mitzvah, I went to my nan's, and she made kugel.

Every bar mitzvah I ever went to was, 'Here comes 'Oh, What a Night.'

I am a Bengali. My mother is from Mangalore so it's a mix of both cultures at home.