Quotes About Tradition

The English were indeed noted for their superstitious credulity as well as their piety;

He had read the text in Leviticus that prohibited any man from marrying the widow of a dead brother.

and conferred on Henry the title of Fidei Defensor, 'Defender of the Faith'. It was not supposed to be inherited, but the royal family have used it ever since.

but, for most, the practice of religion was determined by custom and regulated by authority.

In previous times no flesh had ever been eaten on fish days; now the people of London scorned fish as a relic of papistry.

The shires of England were unique, their boundaries lasting for more than a thousand years until the administrative reorganization of 1974.

The rise of the stricter forms of Protestantism had not yet inhibited the lavish materialism that seems to characterize Elizabethan society. This might be described as the first secular age.

The duke of Norfolk remarked to his chaplain, 'You see, we have hindered priests from having wives.' 'And can your grace', the chaplain replied, 'prevent also men's wives from having priests?

The kings of these territories were executed in the ritual of the 'blood eagle', whereby the lungs were ripped out of the body and draped across the shoulders so that they resembled an eagle's folded wings.

Since there was no picture of the old country in our house and since I didn't have one etched in my mind, the old country came to mean my grandmother. Whatever it was, she was. Whatever she was, it was.

German greeting

Postmodernism is part of a recent tradition in the humanities that opposes the idea that language should be analyzed as a system used to represent, or stand for; objects and situations in the world. This anti-representationalist view of language influenced a lot of literary theory, as well as other humanistic disciplines, in the latter part of the twentieth century. Postmodernism is a spectacular outgrowth of that line of thought.

a country like China is accustomed to making difficult choices that Americans might not dream of considering

In the countryside, traditional parents avoid flattery, and the mother's responses were automatic—it was like knocking her knee with a rubber hammer. She didn't want to spoil the child, but there was also the Chinese superstition that pride attracts misfortune.

When the cadres banned his students from singing any actual Christmas carols in a stage version of ''A Christmas Carol,'' he had them substitute patriotic Communist songs -- which actually improved Dickens: ''My favorite scene was when a furious Scrooge swung his cane at a band of merry carolers who were belting out 'The East Is Red,' singing the praises of Mao Zedong while the old man shouted, 'Humbug!

For some reason, it had become a tradition for tourists to throw money into the hole in front of the Sphinx. Of all the strange things that foreigners and rich Egyptians did at the ancient sites, this ritual most impressed Sayyid and his family.

The Chinese people had invented the compass, paper, the printing press, gunpowder, the seismograph, the crossbow, and the umbrella; they had sailed to Africa in the fifteenth century; they had constructed the Great Wall; over the past decade they had built their economy at a rate never before seen in the developing world. They could return a rental car with exactly three-eighths of a tank of gas, but filling it was apparently beyond the realm of cultural possibility.

In an age that has thrown off all tradition, the only rebellion possible is orthodoxy.

The Church has always had a conservative head and a liberal heart, and the world has never understood her, just as it never understood Christ.

Judaism, the one and only directly and divinely revealed religion in the world

Literature in the West arose from liturgy.

Several years ago, Debashish Chatterjee, a good friend and well-known author on leadership1 opened a seminar on leadership at MIT by saying, 'I've been guided in my work by the notion that older is often better. If an idea has been around for a few thousand years, it's been submitted to many tests—which is a good indicator that it might have some real merit. We're fixated on newness, which often misleads us into elevating novelty over substance.

Though a few older men cut fingers in time of grief, it is usually the smallest girls who are selected for this ceremony, and a woman in the valley whose left hand is not a stump is very rare.

The pig had been killed because spirits, like people, cannot resist the smell of cooking pig.