Quotes About Tradition

“The moral views now associated in the secularist mind with superstition and ignorance in fact follow inexorably from a consistent application of the metaphysical ideas we've traced back through Aquinas and the other Scholastic thinkers to Plato and Aristotle, the very greatest of the Greek founders of the Western intellectual tradition.”

— Edward Feser

“Luckily, however, life doesn't always follow tradition, but craves out a path of its own.”

— Kader Abdolah

“Some Saturday mornings, as soon as the mountains had bottled up the last cheerful sound of Bob and the truck, I, feeling like a cross between a boll weevil and a slut, took a large cup of hot coffee, a hot-water bottle, a cigarette and a magazine and WENT BACK TO BED. Then, from six-thirty until nine or so, I luxuriated in breaking the old mountain tradition that a decent woman is in bed only between the hours of seven pm and four am unless she is in labor or dead.”

— Betty MacDonald

“Sometimes tradition and habit are just that, comfortable excuses to leave things be, even when they are unjust and unworthy. Sometimes
not often, but sometimes
the cranks and radicals turn out to be right. Sometimes Everyone is wrong.”

— Matthew Scully

“As never before, he understood the vitality of tradition, the dignity of the worship of what had existed before one's own self had come into being. There was no shame in awe; there was exaltation. ("Cafe Endless: Spring Rain")”

— Nancy Holder

“He saw in Populism the first glimmerings of some of the great intellectual upheavals of the twentieth century-naturalism, muckraking, and hard-hitting social satire-which would eventually topple the genteel tradition of the nineteenth century. In a peculiar way, Parrington seemed to think, Kansas was one of the birthplaces of literary modernism.”

— Thomas Frank

“Culinary tradition is not always based on fact. Sometimes it's based on history, on habits that come out of a time when kitchens were fueled by charcoal.”

— Alton Brown

“We live in a world that has practically no appreciation for quality, tradition, or classiness, and in which people who can't spell even common words get to decide what survives. That”

— Bill Bryson

“To be disrespectful of tradition and of historical theology is to be disrespectful of the Holy Spirit who has been actively enlightening the church in every century.”

— John R.W. Stott

“Of course the Curies died. They identified ionizing radiation while bathing in it. There were risks involved in being your own guinea pig. But there was a long tradition of scientists doing just that: of paying for the expansion of human knowledge with their lives. I didn't deserve to be categorized with them, because honestly, I wasn't interested in the greater good. I just wanted to make myself better legs. I didn't mind other people benefiting in some long-term indirect way but it wasn't what motivated me. I felt guilty about this for a while. Every time a lab assistant looked at me with starstruck eyes, I felt I should confess: Look, I'm not being heroic. I'm just interested in seeing what I can do. Then it occured to me that maybe they all felt this way. All these great scientists who risked their themselves to bring light to darkness, maybe they weren't especially altruistic either. Maybe they were like me, seeing what they could do.”

— Max Barry

“It was a tradition between them that they should never be too tired for anything, and they found it made the days better on the whole and put the evenings more in order.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

“It is a mistake to suppose that he rejected poetry for aesthetic reasons. What is overlooked in all of this is that Plato came between an older tradition of philosophy and Christianity. He saw the danger of violence much more clearly because of his proximity to the pre-Socratics. The understanding of the danger is essential, vital in Plato.”

— René Girard

“We tend to lament this seemingly endless parceling of Christianity (which, let's face it, can indeed get out of hand), but I'm not convinced the pursuit of greater unity means rejecting denominationalism altogether. A worldwide movement of more than two billion people reaching every continent and spanning thousands of cultures for over two thousand years can't expect homogeneity. And the notion that a single tradition owns the lockbox on truth is laughable, especially when the truth we're talking is God.”

— Rachel Held Evans

“My dad doesn't like religion much, but I grew up very close to the Baptist tradition. God isn't this distant thing. God is right here with you all the time. He's your buddy, and you can talk about everything.”

— Lucy Alibar

“[W]e may now be on the threshold of a new kind of genetic takeover. DNA replicators built 'survival machines' for themselves - the bodies of living organisms including ourselves. As part of their equipment, bodies evolved onboard computers - brains. Brains evolved the capacity to communicate with other brains by means of language and cultural traditions. But the new milieu of cultural tradition opens up new possibilities for self-replicating entities. The new replicators are not DNA and they are not clay crystals. They are patterns of information that can thrive only in brains or the artificially manufactured products of brains - books, computers, and so on. But, given that brains, books and computers exist, these new replicators, which I called memes to distinguish them from genes, can propagate themselves from brain to brain, from brain to book, from book to brain, from brain to computer, from computer to computer.”

— Richard Dawkins

“Well, dissent is the tradition in America, and I've been on the side of dissent a good bit of my career, particularly in the last many years of the Republican Congress.”

— Lloyd Doggett

“These maxims and the art of interpreting them may be said to constitute the premisses of science but I prefer to call them our scientific beliefs. These premisses or beliefs are embodied in a tradition, the tradition of science.”

— Michael Polanyi

“I went to a boarding school with a strong Maori tradition, where we were taught all about the haka.”

— Jonah Lomu

“I think 'tradition' is in the past - and how can someone really 'fear' a color? A man may prefer navy to turquoise, but a self assured man could wear any color and he knows that. It's a distinction of confidence.”

— Jean Pigozzi

“The Liberal Democrat Party and the Conservative Party come at things very differently when it comes to Europe. When it comes to political reform, we have a much greater tradition in the Liberal Democrats of social justice and fairness than the Conservatives do.”

— Nick Clegg

“Almost every venerable tradition at a men's club starts out as a joke.”

— Joe Bob Briggs

“Any Democratic statement of core beliefs about the importance of families must include all our families, gay and straight. Our party has a long tradition of leading the charge on important questions of justice.”

— Jeanne Shaheen

“The Muppets have such a great tradition of bringing together all of genres of actors and all ages of actors.”

— Amy Adams

“Something is missing in our culture. We can't quite celebrate the scientific literary tradition.”

— Ian McEwan

“There is a Jewish tradition of family, too, but then not all Italian or Jewish families are close.”

— Richard Rogers

“Nations need to understand their own strengths and weaknesses, and India's tradition of dissent and democratic debate is a positive aspect.”

— Rosabeth Moss Kanter

“In the greed-is-good tradition of the 'Harry Potter' and 'Twilight' movie franchises, the overseers of 'The Hunger Games' have split the last book into two films.”

— Richard Corliss

“Born in the silent era, with the first ceremony hosted by Douglas Fairbanks at the Roosevelt Hotel, the Oscars are a tradition in a business that doesn't have much of it, and the biggest spectacle in a business that's often nothing but.”

— Steve Erickson

“There is a complexity and layering that goes on with this kind of thing, so the music is slightly repetitive and when I say repetitive it's in the same tradition as people like Steve Reich or Erik Satie or even WC.”

— DJ Spooky

“After an interval of two and a half centuries, the tradition of mystic illumination renewed itself in Italy and Germany.”

— James Mark Baldwin

“The pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, an almost fanatical love of justice and the desire for personal independence
these are the features of the Jewish tradition which make me thank my stars that I belong to it.”

— Albert Einstein

“You've got to know the rules to break them. That's what I'm here for, to demolish the rules but to keep the tradition.”

— Alexander McQueen

“Refined, intense, wise, stiring, immediate, subtile, all the charmed qualities gather in Dropping the Bow. These translations are precious jewels. Like the erotic moods they investigate, these versions shimmer and startle with a palpable desire to be heard, and a mystical sense of impermanence. This is a transmission of a vital, extraordinary tradition.”

— Anne Waldman

“Modern European composers ... have very largely received their stimulus, their rhythms and impulses from Machine Age America. They have a much older tradition of musical technique which has helped them put into musical terms a little more clearly the thoughts that originated here. They can express themselves more glibly.”

— George Gershwin

“The ending of partition was inevitable because Ireland was one nation by history and tradition , by facts of race, geography, and economy”

— Seamus Costello

“Tradition is tending the flame, not worshiping the ashes.”

— Gustav Mahler

“Tradition is a fine thing. Nothing comes out of the blue, except perhaps thunderbolts and they are not really very useful things.”

— Stacy Aumonier

“There can be no doubt that archaeology has confirmed the substantial historicity of Old Testament tradition.”

— William F. Albright

“Shambhala is a tradition where there were rulers, kings, and powerful people who actually were very benevolent and kind. They got things done, and they didn't abandon their tradition.”

— Sakyong Mipham

“Only those of our poets who kept solidly to the Shakespearean tradition achieved any measure of success. But Keats was the last great exponent of that tradition, and we all know how thin, how lacking in charm, the copies of Keats have become.”

— Amy Lowell

“I haven't come across any recent new ideas in film that strike me as being particularly important and that have to do with form. I think that a preoccupation with originality of form is more or less a fruitless thing. A truly original person with a truly original mind will not be able to function in the old form and will simply do something different. Others had much better think of the form as being some sort of classical tradition and try to work within it.”

— Stanley Kubrick

“The witches, the wise women, and the healers were also always the counselors. It's a whole other tradition of knowledge and learning that has been suppressed because it had political implications.”

— Starhawk

“Campaign promises are - by long democratic tradition - the least binding form of human commitment.”

— Antonin Scalia

“Literature is conscious mythology: as society develops, its mythical stories become structural principles of story-telling, its mythical concepts, sun-gods and the like, become habits of metaphoric thought. In a fully mature literary tradition the writerenters intoa structure of traditional stories and images.”

— Northrop Frye

“So here I stand before you preaching organic architecture: declaring organic architecture to be the modern ideal and the teaching so much needed if we are to see the whole of life, and to now serve the whole of life, holding no traditions essential to the great TRADITION. Nor cherishing any preconceived form fixing upon us either past, present or future, but-instead-exalting the simple laws of common sense-or of super-sense if you prefer-determining form by way of the nature of materials ...”

— Frank Lloyd Wright

“We will never get great art from women if their education exposes them only to the second-rate and if the idea of greatness itself is denied. Greatness is not a white male trick. Every important world civilization has defined its artistic tradition in elitist terms of distinction and excellence.”

— Camille Paglia

“After a long time spent learning how to write as a woman instead of as an honorary man, I was able to come back to Earthsea and write the next three books in another and newer tradition: that of questioning, rather than accepting, the gendering of power as male.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

“Tradition is a prop for social security.”

— Walter J. Phillips

“I travel up and down the country and I've been all around the middle of America for many years. Middle America is not one big mass of people with a proverbial beer in its hand, keeping the country down. That is not my experience of it and I don't labor under that misconception. And we have a long tradition of coming together through music in our country.”

— Wynton Marsalis

“Those who feel guilty contemplating "betraying" the tradition they love by acknowledging their disapproval of elements within it should reflect on the fact that the very tradition to which they are so loyal-the "eternal" tradition introduced to them in their youth-is in fact the evolved product of many adjustments firmly but delicately made by earlier lovers of the same tradition.”

— Daniel Dennett