Thomas Paine Quotes

Cultures grow on the vine of tradition.

In America nothing dies easier than tradition.

History is the key to everything: politics, religion, even fashion.

In the stable periods of history, meaning was supplied in the context of a coherent community and traditionally prescribed patterns of culture. Today we cannot count on any such inheritance.

It is of the essence of traditions that they cover or conceal their humble foundations by erecting impressive edifices on them.

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.

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

Culture is a slingshot moved by the force of its past

(Tradition) is the democracy of the dead.

What men call civilization is the condition of present customs; what they call barbarism, the condition of past ones.

Customs represent the experience of mankind.

Culture itself is neither education nor law-making: it is an atmosphere and a heritage.

What seems natural to us is probably just something familiar in a long tradition that has forgotten the unfamiliar source from which it arose. And yet this unfamiliar source once struck man as strange and caused him to think and to wonder.

The political and social processes by which the Western European societies were put in order are not very apparent, have been forgotten, or have become habitual. They are part of our most familiar landscape, and we don't perceive them anymore. But most of them once scandalized people.

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

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.

Tradition, if not constantly recreated, can be as much a millstone as a mill-wheel.

I adore tradition. I cannot stand habit. Simply to repeat is nothing, also to destroy is nothing. Tradition is never interrupted, we are always evolving but never interrupted.

What ever happened to freak shows? Back in the twenties when elephant man was born at least he had a job waiting for him.

You can't take treasured beliefs from the past and mock them.

The American dream has always depended on the dialogue between the present and the past. In our architecture, as in all our other arts-indeed, as in our political and social culture as a whole-ours has been a struggle to formulate and sustain a usable past.

But a man is not forgotten, as long as there are two people left under the sky. One, to tell the story; the other, to hear it.

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

We're going to have to change our traditions, our history.

Just because something is traditional is no reason to do it, of course. Piracy, for example, is a tradition that has been carried on for hundreds of years, but that doesn't mean we should all attack ships and steal their gold.