Walter Lippmann Quotes

If you plan on continuing a tradition, it might be a good idea to find out just what tradition it is that you intend to continue.

I'm the proof - you can't throw away tradition.

...how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity!

Almost always tradition is nothing but a record and a machine-made imitation of the habits that our ancestors created. The average conservative is a slave to the most incidental and trivial part of his forefathers glory - to the archaic formula which happened to express their genius or the eighteenth-century contrivance by which for a time it was served.

Custom is our nature. What are our natural principles but principles of custom?

Authority is by nothing so much strengthened and confirmed as by custom; for no man easily distrusts the things which he and all men have been always bred up to.

Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.

I grew up in a wonderful blend of a lot of old culture.

An atmosphere of beliefs and conceptions has been formed by the labours and struggles of our forefathers, which enables us to breathe amid the various and complex circumstances of our life.

We always live under the weight of the old and odious customs ... of our barbarous ancestors.

The masses of the people are no lovers of changes which run counter to immemorial custom

… a country's laws are written upon paper, and that its customs are engraved upon brass. One may play with the one, but not with the other. It is less risky for a stranger to dance upon our Constitution in the public square than to affront one of our solidified customs. The one is merely eminently respectable, the other is sacred.

Nothing is more difficult, in general, than to make a nation perceive anything as true, or seek its own interest, in any manner but as its forefathers have opined and acted.

A deep meaning resides in old customs.

Traditions insist upon themselves. Look around, and you will see them trying to exist everywhere, in everyone's life.

Man is made of the wholly common, and custom is his nurse; woe then to them who lay irreverent hands on his old house-furniture, the dear inheritance from his forefathers: For time consecrates, and what is gray with age becomes religion.

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.

It sometimes occurs to me that the British have more heritage than isgood for them.

Whenever one honestly defies a tradition, one becomes, in reality, the more responsible to it.

It takes a lifetime to build tradition.

Tradition is only democracy extended through time; it may be defined as an extension of the franchise. 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 are merely walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our father.

We cannot reform our forefathers.

The wisdom of our parents, grandparents, ancestors. In each individual life, it seems, we must first reject that wisdom, then later come to appreciate it.

Traditions are neither good nor bad, they simply are... Rationality is not an arbiter of traditions, it is itself a tradition or an aspect of a tradition.

Tradition implies authority, conformity, imitation, following.