Quotes about tradition

In America nothing dies easier than tradition.

— Russell (Wayne) Baker

The assumption must be that those who can see value only in tradition, or versions of it, deny man's ability to adapt to changing circumstances.

— Stephen Bayley

As soon as tradition has come to be recognized as tradition, it is dead.

— Allan Bloom

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 around.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

The dead govern the living.

— Auguste Comte

Tradition! We scarcely know the word anymore. We are afraid to be either proud of our ancestors or ashamed of them. We scorn nobility in name and in fact. We cling to a bourgeois mediocrity which would make it appear we are all Americans, made in the image and likeness of George Washington.

— Dorothy Day

I'm an old-fashioned guy... I want to be an old man with a beer belly sitting on a porch, looking at a lake or something.

— Johnny Depp

A precedent embalms a principle.

— Benjamin Disraeli

It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labor.

— T. S. Eliot

A tradition without intelligence is not worth having.

— T. S. Eliot

People should think things out fresh and not just accept conventional terms and the conventional way of doing things.

— R. Buckminster Fuller

Traditions are the guideposts driven deep in our subconscious minds. The most powerful ones are those we can't even describe and aren't even aware of.

— Ellen Goodman

There is nothing in the world more stubborn than a corpse: you can hit it, you can knock it to pieces, but you cannot convince it.

— Alexander Herzen

To keep up even a worthwhile tradition means vitiating the idea behind it which must necessarily be in a constant state of evolution: it is mad to try to express new feelings in a mummified form.

— Alfred Jarry

Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.

— W. Somerset Maugham

Traditionalists are pessimists about the future and optimists about the past.

— Lewis Mumford