Quotes About Customs

Do you know how wizards like to be buried?""Yes!""Well, how?"Granny Weatherwax paused at the bottom of the stairs."Reluctantly.

Culture has no logic.

American manners are different than British manners.

Sophie Hodorowicz Knab, Polish Customs, Traditions, and Folklore (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1996), p. 259.   people

A Greek will never say anything he hasn't already said a thousand times." Her husband Charles reprimanded me for not knowing the word. To Charles it was a mark of one's respect for other cultures to know the local terms of abuse and the words for sex acts and natural wastes.

Violation of cultural conventions can completely disrupt an interaction.

Germans found American (by which they often meant Irish) bars and their drinking customs both peculiar and unhealthy.

Actually," Coursey lowered his voice an octave, "we've been informed by Homeland Security that three members of a subversive Brazilian band went through Customs at O'Hare Airport eleven days ago.

There are no superstitions but those you invent

Unlike societies that employed baroque procedures for distinguishing between legitimate and illegitimate children, the Mongols accepted all children as equal. No child could be born without the consent of the Eternal Blue Sky. No earthly law or custom could presume to declare the child illegitimate.

in the face of horror, ancient rituals regained their meaning

For example, the resemblance between the word for "bride" and the verb meaning "to steal away" in Indo-Germanic languages is taken as evidence of marriage by capture in early times

What did you do that for?" the customs guy asked him. "We haven't been getting along lately," Jack admitted. "Well, this'll really help," the guy said.

Clothes, whips, reading material," the customs officer had summarized, in Spanish and English, to the young American. "Just the bare essentials!" Edward Bonshaw

It is law that guests must be fed before the host's curiosity.

So one of the ways to maintain a certain sense of self is to remain somewhat linked to essential traditionalism.

Under the influence of the leaders of the colonists an entire new legal system was introduced. About 962, after the victories of the kings of Wessex, one of them, Edgar, declared: "I desire that among the Danes the secular law continue to be regulated according to their good customs.

It is not simply to show power...that a man...throws coppers into the sea...In doing this he is also sacrificing to the gods and spirits...

Q'eeng had just attempted in the third dialect the traditional rightward schism greeting of "I offer you the bread of life," but his phrasing and accent had transmuted the statement into "Let us violate cakes together.

It was quite normal in that day for a man to use up three or four wives in a normal lifetime.

I have never smuggled anything in my life. Why, then, do I feel an uneasy sense of guilt on approaching a customs barrier?

Sitting down to a meal with an Indian family is different from sitting down to a meal with a British family.

Our fathers gave us many laws which they had learned from their fathers. These laws were good.

Cultural predilections are not to be confused with theological absolutes. The former are preferences - the latter are immutable.