Quotes About Customs

I am very superstitious about toasts. I never toast with water, and I'm very careful to make eye contact with everyone I toast with.

do in rome as romans do do

In the Roman Empire a child's religion was determined not by some choice in the teenage years but by that child's family.

I'm not extra sensitive to handshakes. I shake hands all the time.

Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits.

Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits. Fanatics will never learn that, though it be written in letters of gold across the sky. It is the prohibition that makes anything precious

It is a mistake that there is no bath that will cure people's manners, but drowning would help.

Customs do not concern themselves with right or wrong or reason. But they have to be obeyed; one reasons all around them until he is tired, but he must not transgress them, it is sternly forbidden.

the Welshman allowed it to eat into the vitals of his visitors

One of his favorite jokes was about a guy who was smuggling wheelbarrows. Every day for years and years a customs agent carefully searched through this guy's wheelbarrow. Finally, when he was about to retire, the customs agent asked the guy, We've become friends. I've searched your wheelbarrow every day for many years. What is it you're muggling? My friend, I am smuggling wheelbarrows.

Did you know that the highest form of respect for the Navajo is to call someone Grandfather? In fact, that's how they address God.

Political opposition... is given an inhumane overlay, which then justifies the abrogation of all normally applied customs of civilized behavior. A political policy is equated with moral right, and opposition to it with diabolical malevolence.

Culture is the sum total of shared habits and expectations

Every place has a deep-seated culture as to how things are done. Culture is the sum total of shared habits and expectations.

la cultura es a la vez algo necesario y casual, como el lecho de un nido, un refugio frente al mundo, un pequeño contra-mundo aceptado tácitamente por el grande de una forma relativamente indiferente, pues no contiene ninguna respuesta a las preguntas sobre el bien y el mal, la belleza y la fealdad, las reglas y las costumbres.

Most parents would not allow more than one daughter to remain unmarried. So if one daughter had already declared herself a spinster, her sister had to conduct a marriage ceremony with a dead man, called marrying a tablet, to retain her independence. These women later told historians that "it was not so easy to find an unmarried dead man to marry," so when one did become available, they vied with one another "to be the one who would get to marry him.

I love the Chinese words for greeting: not strictly 'Hello' but 'Have you eaten yet?

Sacredness binds people together, and then blinds them to the arbitrariness of the practice.

The crucial differentiation between humans and all other animals is that we make meanings, and the name we give to collective systems of meanings is culture.

Fingers were made before forks, and hands before knives.

To do exactly as your neighbors do is the only sensible rule.

The only extra plates ever permitted are the bread and butter plates which are put on at breakfast and lunch and supper above and to the left of the forks, but never at dinner.

Indeed, it may be suggested that 'traditions' and pragmatic conventions or routines are inversely related.

I give you this life for honoring old traditions on behalf of the future.