Leon Wieseltier Quotes

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.

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.

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

Institutions are what allow us to have continuity in civilizations.

I just love tradition.

I find great joy in tradition, and, in fact, I seek it.

Change is no threat to culture.

I am the reassurance that they have not changed. In an upside down world, with all the rules being rewritten as the game goes on and spectators invading the pitch, it is good to feel that some things and some people seem to stay just as they were.

We live in a changing world, but we need to be reminded that the important things have not changed, and the important things will not change if we keep our priorities in proper order.

I am the family face; flesh perishes, I live on.

We are all part of a tradition, at least we depend on the past.

Tradition is the illusion of permanance.

I have always played into the belief that you are only ever borrowing the jersey; you never own the jersey because someone has gone before you and there is going to be someone after you, so it's a case of giving the jersey maximum respect.

I have seen the future, and it is much like the present, only longer.

The world changes, but I want that change to be necessary or respectful of what has happened before. Everything changes, and that's quite right.

The more things change, the more they are the same.

In modern Western culture, the new is considered better than the old, and thus change itself is considered good; in tradition bound Arab cultures, the old is considered better than the new, and thus the retention of the existing order is good.

... legislating to regulate cultural change is like lassoing a locomotive with a cobweb.

When it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Two things in America are astonishing: the changeableness of most human behavior and the strange stability of certain principles. Men are constantly on the move, but the spirit of humanity seems almost unmoved.

What is today supported by precedents will hereafter become a precedent.

… 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.

Tradition wears a snowy beard.

We want traditional change—not transformational change.