C. S. Lewis Quotes

In France, in Europe, the young artists of any generation always act as grandsons of some great man - Poussin, for example, or Victor Hugo. They can't help it. Even if they don't believe in that, it gets in their system. And so when they come to produce something of their own, the tradition is nearly indestructible.

Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

Every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers.

You know the puritan ethic that started out four centuries ago in this country, needless to say - at least for the moment - a thing of the past - from what I can tell.

I'd rather be at the end of a dying tradition, which I admire, than at the beginning of a tradition which I deplore.

I feel blessed in the knowledge that I probably belong to the last generation that will remember what we call "traditional America."

Ancestors do not mean so much. The rebel who succeeds generally makes it easier for the posterity that follows him; so these descendants are usually contented and smug and soft. Rebels are made from life, not ancestors.

the difference between a rebel and a patriot depends upon who is in power at the moment.

Tradition itself, in times of dogmatism and dogmatic revolution, is a revolutionary force which must be safeguarded.

There is no creation without tradition. No one creates from nothing.

Before this generation goes on to its ancestors, we should, we must, do our level best to pass on our lessons, so that they live in our people's minds and lives.

Tradition lives because young people come along who catch its romance and add new glories to it.

We're dead as a species if we don't tell stories, because then we don't know who we are.

Social change rarely comes about through the efforts of the disenfranchised. The middle class creates social revolutions.

If you really wanna be a rebel, read your bible.

Every revolution by force only puts more violent means of enslavement into the hands of the persons in power.

The most likely way to kill a tradition is to over-formalize it, which is to carry it on in the same way after everyone has ceased to defer to it. The way to revive it is to show that it has grown out of and is still related to our most cherished values. But this requires radical insight and the stripping away of many things which are mere accretions.

Rebels seldom make good revolutionaries, because organized action, even union with other people, is not possible for them.

I do talk and think a lot about the legacy before me. I feel like if I didn't know that people had been in Montgomery sixty years ago trying to do similar things that I'm trying to do, with a lot less, with fewer resources, with less security, with less encouragement, with less opportunity - if I didn't know that, then I think doing what I do would be much, much harder.

The endless legacy of the past to the present is the secret source of human genius.

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.

And you must tell the child the legends I told you - as my mother told them to me and her mother to her. You must tell the fairy tales of the old country. You must tell of those not of the earth who live forever in the hearts of the people.

All women are rebels.

I am continually influenced by the feeling that music culture captured in the late 60s - for my generation, it was a time to rebel, against our parents, against everything.