Bill Bryson Quotes

Culture, which makes talent shine, is not completely ours either, nor can we place it solely at our disposal. Rather, it belongs mainly to our country, which gave it to us, and to humanity, from which we receive it as a birthright.

When I went back to England after a year away, the country seemed stuck, dozing in a fairy tale, stifled by the weight of tradition.

We always live under the weight of the old and odious customs ... of our barbarous ancestors.

It is our turn to guard our heritage from Mongol, and Persian and Moor, before we become engulfed in a limitless foreign sea.

A people without a positive history is like a vehicle without an engine.

Almost always tradition is nothing but a record and a machine-made imitation of the habits that our ancestors created.

Be as proud of your race today as our as our fathers were in days of yore. We have beautiful history, and we shall create another in the future that will astonish the world.

Tradition! We scarcely know the word anymore. We are afraid to be either proud of our ancestors or ashamed of them. We scorn nobility in name and in fact. We cling to a bourgeois mediocrity which would make it appear we are all Americans, made in the image and likeness of George Washington.

Just as a tree without roots is dead, a people without history or cultural roots also becomes a dead people.

My country has no history, only a past.

We cannot reform our forefathers.

We have 5000-year-old history which is now almost a part of our DNA. How do you break that? America, for example, doesn't have that history behind it. It romanticizes rebellion. We look down upon rebellion. It's an insult. To think out-of-the-box is looked down upon here.

The younger generation of filmmakers is concerned about our roots, rather than making films with characters plucked out of the cloud or some English DVD. Actually since 2000, Tamil cinema is going through some positive changes.

Americans are locked into our traditions.

We have received a heritage of craftsmanship, of aesthetics, of taste, of identity. Our brands have the beauty to preserve and perpetuate it.

Mark you, if you give up spirituality, leaving it aside to go after the materializing civilization of the West, the result will be that in three generations you will be an extinct race; because the backbone of the nation will be broken, the foundation upon which the national edifice has been built will be undermined, and the result will be annihilation all round.

Aboriginal people have much to celebrate in this country's British heritage

I believe that many people have forgotten what their roots are. This is one of the advantages of countries with a monarchy. The monarch offers identity across generations, and is a part of these roots and this native country.

Conservatism has always meant more to me than simply sticking up for private property & free enterprise. It has also meant defending our heritage & preserving our values.

I believe that culture begins in the cradle . . .To do without tales and stories and books is to lose humanity's past, is to have no star map for our future.

Obviously, I would have been happier if Canada had not been conquered in the past by the English, if this part of North America had remained French, but you can't rewrite history.

No nation can survive without passing its heritage, language and, yes, faith to the next generation. A country must be built on something substantial and if the cultural elitists think it can be built on 'diversity,' that is a foundation of shifting sand.

For all the casual slurs about 'cultural imperialism', British imperialists were more interested in other cultures than anybody before or since, and, if they hadn't dug it up and taken care of it, we'd know hardly anything about the ancient world. What's important about a nation's past is not what it keeps walled up in the museum but what it keeps outside, living and breathing as every citizen's inheritance.

They talk about their Pilgrim blood, their birthright high and holy! a mountain-stream that ends in mud thinks is melancholy.

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.