Norman Jewison Quotes

I don't think you can revive traditions on purpose.

People tend to believe that to be modern you have to disengage from your heritage, but it's not true.

My successor may need to be more modern than I am. It's a question of generations.

What we need in America is a renaissance. We need to go forward by going backward.

Where is the society that does not struggle along under the dead weight of tradition and law inherited from its grandfathers.

That which separates ourselves from previous generations is rhetoric.

We will pass on a document will not have exactly the same meaning it had when we received it from our fathers.

I think traditions change and modify with each generation. With new members joining the family, their customs and traditions have to be respected and combined with the exiting traditions. And the children that follow are part of that new evolving tradition and, as they grow, will have input that will, in turn, continue to evolve that tradition.

It takes more than a few generations to change a human nation. Those who are intent to bring (change) will do so.

Every generation reinvents the wheel - and in the process it often adds to rather than subtracts from a woman's burdens.

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

Customs will often outlive the remembrance of their origin.

But a people unable to reform will not be able to preserve its old culture either.

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.

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

The basis of national identity is to say, "This is authentic to me or my forebears," and is there even such a thing? How authentic is it to your life? Just because your grandfather did it, what does that have to do with you? If I say I'm working in the style of Rembrandt, so what? You can say it, but are you really? No, because when you try to literally copy a cultural artifact, you change it. It dissolves, and then who's looking at it? People who appreciate that kind of drawing, or people it means nothing to?

A tradition is kept alive only by something being added to it.

I’m just confusing the thrill of being young with the notion that the era in which I was young was in any way especially creative or remarkable.

I am very concerned about our national heritage, and I am very concerned that the films that I watched when I was young and the films that I watched throughout my life are preserved, so that my children can see them.

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

The heterodoxy of one generation is the orthodoxy of the next.

The fact is, the public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities. They use them as bludgeons for preventing the free expression of Beauty in new forms.

The people of Iran have been battling against consecutive conflicts between tradition and modernity for over 100 years... some have tried and are trying to see the world through the eyes of their predecessors and to deal with the problems and difficulties of the existing world by virtue of the values of the ancients... many others...seek to go forth in step with world developments and not lag behind the caravan of civilization, development and progress.

Change comes not from men and women changing their minds, but from the change from one generation to the next.

Culture has always been more important than politics. Sometimes culture is a mirror that reflects what is; sometimes it's a search-light pointing the way to what will be.