Quotes About Tradition

New is America's oldest tradition.

The houses were small, there was no air-conditioning, and TV had not yet penetrated, so when the weather was warm, social life was conducted on the front stoops, in the alleys, and with children running from house to house all day. A young homeowner was enveloped in a series of communal activities that, as Ehrenhalt puts it, "only the most determined loner could escape: barbecues, coffee klatches, volleyball games, baby-sitting co-ops and the constant bartering of household goods.

Marriage is like a formality for me.

Japanese medical people are traditionally very strange and creepily poetic.

He wouldn't perform without a recording now, she was certain, like a poet working in the oral tradition who had been contaminated by the advent of the recording device and so insisted that all improvisations be saved for posterity.

An optimistic civilization is open and not afraid to innovate, and is based on traditions of criticism.

The Enlightenment (The beginning of) a way of pursuing knowledge with a tradition of criticism and seeking good explanations instead of reliance on authority.

Rejecting authority in regard to knowledge was not just a matter of abstract analysis. It was a necessary condition for progress, because, before the Enlightenment, it was generally believed that everything important that was knowable had already been discovered, and was enshrined in authoritative sources such as ancient writings and traditional assumptions. Some of those sources did contain some genuine knowledge, but it was entrenched in the form of dogmas along with many falsehoods

What was needed for the sustained, rapid growth of knowledge was a tradition of criticism. Before the Enlightenment, that was a very rare sort of tradition: usually the whole point of a tradition was to keep things the same.

One consequence of this tradition of criticism was the emergence of a methodological rule that a scientific theory must be testable (though this was not made explicit at first). That is to say, the theory must make predictions which, if the theory were false, could be contradicted by the outcome of some possible observation. Thus, although scientific theories are not derived from experience, they can be tested by experience – by observation or experiment

When I was a wee lad, Uncle Dickie sat me on his knee, and regaled me with stories about the genesis of a game that involved trying to jam a ball into a hole in the ground with a stick

Respect the elders. Embrace the new. Encourage the impractical and improbable, without bias.

Only with the London games of 1908 did the now familiar model of official gold, silver and bronze medals, awarded on the day they were won, emerge. Even then, the ceremony lacked drama. There was no podium, no flags, and no music, just the gruff words of IOC grandees and floral bouquets. Flags and music arrived in 1928, but there was still no podium.

There are many problems with this argument. We'll start with the most obvious. The idea that our current ideals of freedom, equality and democracy are somehow products of the 'Western tradition' would in fact have come as an enormous surprise to someone like Voltaire

while we are used to assuming that there's something natural or inevitable about the existence of corporations, in historical terms, they are actually strange, exotic creatures. No other great tradition came up with anything like it.170 They are the most peculiarly European addition to that endless proliferation of metaphysical entities so characteristic of the Middle Ages—as well as the most enduring.

Spanish observers reported a traditional practice: that on the death of a Calusa ruler, or of his principal wife, a certain quota of their subjects' sons and daughters had to be put to death. By most definitions, all this would make Carlos not just a king, but a sacred king, perhaps divine.

To this day, indigenous societies incorporated into the global economy, from Bolivia to Taiwan, almost invariably frame their own traditions, as Marshall Sahlins puts it, by opposition to the white man's 'living in the way of money'.38

From a world-historical perspective, it seems much more sensible to see Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as three different manifestations of the same great Western intellectual tradition

In reality, there's every reason to believe that farming 'reached' California just as soon as it reached anywhere else in North America. It's just that (despite a work ethic that valorized strenuous labour, and a regional exchange system that would have allowed information about innovations to spread rapidly) people there rejected the practice as definitively as they did slavery.

When I lived in Madagascar, I found that rural people—who had little use for clocks—still often described distance the old-fashioned way and said that to walk to another village would take two cookings of a pot of rice. In medieval Europe, people spoke similarly of something as taking "three paternosters," or two boilings of an egg. This sort of thing is extremely common. In places without clocks, time is measured by actions rather than action being measured by time.

One gets the sense that indigenous life was, to put it very crudely, just a lot more interesting than life in a 'Western' town or city, especially insofar as the latter involved long hours of monotonous, repetitive, conceptually empty activity. The fact that we find it hard to imagine how such an alternative life could be endlessly engaging and interesting is perhaps more a reflection on the limits of our imagination than on the life itself.

Judaism: A Modern Movement with an Ancient Past

Many activities were forbidden on the Sabbath: work, play, and unnecessary travel. Even minor instances of Sabbath-breaking were punished with much severity. The Essex County Court indicted a man for carrying a burden on the Sabbath, and punished a woman for brewing on the Lord's Day. When Ebenezer Taylor of Yarmouth, Massachusetts, fell into a forty-foot well, his rescuers stopped digging on Saturday afternoon while they debated whether it was lawful to rescue him on the Sabbath. Other

We never let go of a belief once fixed in our minds" quoted by an Appalachian women with an air of pride.' (This quote explains a lot about my family)