TRADITION QUOTES
quotations about tradition
The Clan lived by unchanging tradition. Every facet of their lives from the time they were born until they were called to the world of the spirits was circumscribed by the past. It was an attempt at survival, unconscious and unplanned except by nature in a last-ditch effort to save the race from extinction, and doomed to failure. They could not stop change, and resistance to it was self-defeating, anti-survival.
JEAN M. AUEL
The Clan of the Cave Bear
Sometimes tradition and habit are just that, comfortable excuses to leave things be, even when they are unjust and unworthy.
MATTHEW SCULLY
Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy
Tradition is the illusion of permanence.
WOODY ALLEN
Deconstructing Harry
Tradition, long conditioned thinking, can bring about a fixation, a concept that one readily accepts, perhaps not with a great deal of thought.
JIDDU KRISHNAMURTI
Krishnamurti to Himself
What we need is search for fundamentals, not reiteration of traditions born in days when men knew even less than we do now.
THOMAS EDISON
interview, "Thomas A. Edison on Immortality", The Columbian Magazine, January 1911
Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.
G. K. CHESTERTON
"The Ethics of Elfland", Orthodoxy
Tradition: one of those words conservative people use as a shortcut to thinking.
WARREN ELLIS
Transmetropolitan, Vol. 4: The New Scum
As tradition is a gift of the Spirit, its trajectory moves in the right direction, although it has not arrived at its destination.
BRIAN D. MCLAREN
A Generous Orthodoxy
Sometimes traditions turn into unwritten rules we don't want to break.
JAY FEENEY
"Wedding Rules You Should Break In 2017", Huffington Post, April 27, 2017
Every tradition grows ever more venerable -- the more remote its origin, the more confused that origin is. The reverence due to it increases from generation to generation. The tradition finally becomes holy and inspires awe.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Human, All Too Human
All tradition is merely the past.
JIDDU KRISHNAMURTI
Krishnamurti to Himself
Tradition is a process of debate over what links past, present, and future in a continuity that is meaningful and authoritative.
ZAREENA GREWAL
Islam Is a Foreign Country: American Muslims and the Global Crisis of Authority
Cultures grow on the vine of tradition.
JONAH GOLDBERG
National Review Online, August 15, 2001
When traditions become so hard and fast that their adherence actually frustrates the original point of their adoption, then it's time to rethink their utility.
GARY J. SCHMITT
"Time to end the filibuster?", American Enterprise Institute, May 4, 2017
Tradition may be good or bad.
NOAH WEBSTER
attributed, Day's Collacon
The less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it.
MARK TWAIN
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Traditions are important, but there's always that balance between traditions and newness and change. Change is hard, but this will be the start of new traditions and experiences.
JEFF WARDLE
"Expressions show choir to end after 43-year run at Buffalo Grove High School", Chicago Tribune, April 18, 2017
The bird that would soar above the level plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings.
KATE CHOPIN
The Awakening
Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.
G. K. CHESTERTON
What I Saw in America
I'd rather be at the end of a dying tradition, which I admire, than at the beginning of a tradition which I deplore.
MARGARET DRABBLE
attributed, The Situation of the Novel