Quotes About Tradition

But intellectually, our ancestors' oral culture was in many ways a shallower one than our own.

Of all the things that people do in the name of God, killing a girl because she doesn't bleed on her wedding night is among the most cruel. Yet the hymen--fragile, rarely seen, and pretty pointless--remains an object of worship among many religions and societies around the world...it is frequently worth more than a human life.

This phenomenon, called guimai funu, exists on a vast

The Huichol believed that the pain of childbirth should be shared, so the mother would hold on to a string tied to her husband's testicles. With each painful contraction, she would give the string a yank so that the man could share the burden. Surely if such a mechanism were more widespread, injuries in childbirth would garner more attention.

As for wife beating, one survey found support for it from 62 percent of Indian village women themselves. And no group systematically abuses young women more cruelly than mothers-in-law, who serve as household matriarchs in much of the world and take charge of disciplining the younger women.

also designed to keep girls chaste is breast ironing.

Culture is sustained in our synapses...It's more than what can be reduced to binary code and uploaded onto the Net. To remain vital, culture must be renewed in the minds of the members of every generation. Outsource memory, and culture withers.

On Hanukkah, the first dark night, Light yourself a candle bright. I'll you, if you will me invite To dance within that gentle light.

cuando se ha cumplido el ritual de lanzar tres puñados de tierra sobre la tumba de los difuntos éstos no regresan

At Christmas, 'It's a Wonderful Life' makes me cry in exactly the same places every time, even though I know it's coming.

Liberalism is a really old British tradition and it has a completely different attitude towards the individual and the relationship between the individual and the state than the collectivist response of Labour, and particularly Old Labour, does.

Sometimes it feels like I live in such a shit town. It meets all reasonable definitions of a shit town. There are still men who put on hats to drive on these roads, our only celebrities are sports stars and newsreaders, and everyone you meet already knows your mother. p.34

Abrahamic tradition under nihilistic direction might not be what anyone wants, but it's what we have. Accelerating iconoclasm turns the world onto The Nothing. Nietzsche was right to interpret the only global history as this. There is no way out of it because it is itself the ultimate outside.

Design no longer leads back towards a divine origin, because once shifted into cybernetics it ceases to commensurate with the theopolitical ideal of the plan. Planning is the creationist symptom of underdesigned software circuits, associated with domination, tradition, and inhibition; with everything that shackles the future to the past. All planning is theopolitics, and theopolitics is cybernetics in a swamp. (298-9)

For everyone knew Fiachnae would rise again, it's what the Irish did, and mac Báetáin was cannier than most.

It was one of the most pernicious fallacies, common the world over: old ways are best. But old ways can outlast their usefulness. Old ways can live on pointlessly in worlds that have no room for them.

She might wear a blade, but she also wears skirts, priest, like you. So she will learn. Teach her. But not about your Christ. There'll be others for that, in time.

She was the only ungirdled girl to work on the main loom, the only one tall enough. The only one with the pattern-making mind, her mother said. The one one without a gemæcce.

The people who built these churches understood wood, and they were not in a hurry.

She could pretend it was enough to sit with a tablet weave between them, as women had for generations, and sometimes talk, sometimes fall into a half trance, mind floating free.

I've heard horror stories of Old Masters wrapped in newspapers and arriving with ghastly copes of the funnies imprinted on a stately old forehead.

This is a craftsman cabin, built for my great-grandfather by masters, not one of the more usual settler's shacks made from whatever came to hand and which have long since rotted away, and good riddance." His smile was real this time. "You always have been a snob, Torvingen." "I like well-made things.

Al repudiar los ritos, el hombre se reduce a animal que copula y come.

The barbarian either totally mocks or totally worships. Civilization is a smile that discreetly combines irony and respect.