Robert G. Ingersoll Quotes

Tradition" is very often an excuse word for people who don't want to change.

People seem to want to follow the beaten path. The difficulty is that the beaten path doesn't seem to be leading anywhere.

Some rules are nothing but old habits that people are afraid to change.

Morality makes stupid.- Custom represents the experiences of men of earlier times as to what they supposed useful and harmful - but the sense for custom (morality) applies, not to these experiences as such, but to the age, the sanctity, the indiscussability of the custom. And so this feeling is a hindrance to the acquisition of new experiences and the correction of customs: that is to say, morality is a hindrance to the development of new and better customs: it makes stupid.

Custom creates the whole of equity, for the simple reason that it is accepted.

People and their rituals. They cling to things so hard sometimes.

Each human being is unique, each with their own qualities, instincts, forms of pleasure, and desire for adventure. However, society always imposes on us a collective ways of behaving, and people never stop to wonder why they should behave like that. They just accept it, the way typists accepted the fact that the QWERTY keyboard was the best possible one. Have you ever met anyone is your entire life who asked why the hands of a clock should go in one particular direction and not the other?

Such figures as Boy George do not disturb me nearly so much as do those relentlessly hetero (sexual?) keepers of the keys and seals, those who know what the world needs in the way of order and who are ready and willing to supply that order.

To many people holidays are not voyages of discovery, but a ritual of reassurance.

Good manners consist of doing precisely what everyone thinks should be done, especially when no one knows quite what that is.

Custom determines what is agreeable.

It seems to me that society usually wins. There are, to be sure, free spirits in the world, but their freedom, in the last analysis, is not much greater than that of a canary in a cage. They may leap from perch to perch; they may bathe and guzzle at their will; they may flap their wings and sing. But they are still in the cage, and soon or late it conquers them.

Propriety was a rigid master, but one that must be obeyed if one wanted to keep a sterling reputation.

The urge to break with a tradition is only appropriate when you're dealing with an outdated, troublesome tradition: I never really thought about that because I take the old-fashioned approach of equating tradition with value (which may be a failing). But whatever the case, positive tradition can also provoke opposition if it's too powerful, too overwhelming, too demanding. That would basically be about the human side of wanting to hold your own.

He who does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice.

Wherever a man goes, men will pursue him and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society.

Tradition implies authority, conformity, imitation, following.

Custom meets us at the cradle and leaves us only at the tomb.

Truth is compared in Scripture to a streaming fountain; if her waters flow not in perpetual progression, they sicken into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition.

Men walk almost always in the paths trodden by others, proceeding in their actions by imitation.

Speak up when you're supposed to, as opposed to trying to write prescriptions for the way people should live.

We encourage one another in mediocrity.

Convention is the ruler of all.

Deviants are sacrificed to increase group solidarity