Robert G. Ingersoll Quotes

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

Custom is our nature …

Customs represent the experience of mankind.

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.

New customs, Though they be never so ridiculous (Nay, let em be unmanly), yet are followed.

Where a bad custom has been in existence for any length of time, most people grow to regard it as part of the order of nature.

The empire of custom is most mighty.

How but in custom and in ceremony are innocence and beauty born?

Cultures grow on the vine of tradition.

In my day, there were things that were done, and things that were not done, and there was even a way of doing things that were not done.

Custom, then, is the great guide of human life. It is that principle alone, which renders our experience useful to us, and makes us expect, for the future, a similar train of events with those which have appeared in the past.

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.

Civilization is a network and a maze of precedences and custom.

Custom is the law of one description of fools, and fashion of another; but the two parties often clash--for precedent is the legislator of the first, and novelty of the last. Custom, therefore, looks to things that are past, and fashion to things that are present.

Custom is a violent and treacherous school mistress. She, by little and lithe, slyly and unperceived, slips in the foot of her authority; but having by this gentle and humble beginning, with the benefit of time, fixed and established it, she then unmasks a furious and tyrannic countenance, against which we have no more the courage or the power so much as to lift up our eyes.

If someone were to put a proposition before men bidding them choose, after examination, the best customs in the world, each nation would certainly select its own.

The life history of the individual is first and foremost an accommodation to the patterns and standards traditionally handed down in his community.

Everything is arranged so that it be this way, this is what is called culture.

It is not reason which is the guide of life, but custom.

Culture is not a biologically transmitted complex.

The way of the world is to make laws, but follow custom.

Custom, then, is the great guide of human life.

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

Action requires co-operation, but in general if you set your face against custom, people will set their faces against you. They cannot tell whether you are right or wrong, but they know that you are guilty of a pragmatical assumption of superiority over them which they do not like.

It is hard to oppose an ideology with a tradition.