Clarence Darrow Quotes

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

Traditions are neither good nor bad, they simply are... Rationality is not an arbiter of traditions, it is itself a tradition or an aspect of a tradition.

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

Myth, legend, and ritual ... function to maintain a status quo. That makes them singularly bad in coping with change, indeed counterproductive, for change is the enemy of myth.

Tradition is nothing but ancestral peer pressure.

Thinking about what Jamaicans want is a bit pressuring. So I try not to think about what Jamaicans want until I get the job done.

Latin American culture is conservative, and the rural areas are tremendously conservative. I don't believe that's just a Chilean thing.

Americans are locked into our traditions.

Family habits die hard.

I asked my mother, 'Why shouldn't I act?' She said, 'Nobody in the family has acted, so why should you?'

Custom is often only the antiquity of error.

Beauty might prevail in the very short term, but in the medium and longer terms, cultural norms - primarily those values and norms influenced by family - were more important.

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

Every tradition grows continually more venerable, and the more remote its origins, the more this is lost sight of. The veneration paid the tradition accumulates from generation to generation, until it at last becomes holy and excites awe.

Cultures grow on the vine of tradition.

(Tradition) is the democracy of the dead.

...how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity!

Can any man or woman choose duties? No more than they can choose their birthplace or their father and mother.

Tradition simply means that we need to end what began well and continue what is worth continuing

Culture is the name for what people are interested in, their thoughts, their models, the books they read and the speeches they hear, their table-talk, gossip, controversies, historical sense and scientific training, the values they appreciate, the quality of life they admire. All communities have a culture. It is the climate of their civilization.

The confused mass of rules of conduct called law, which has been bequeathed to us by slavery, serfdom, feudalism, and royalty, has taken the place of those stone monsters, before whom human victims used to be immolated, and whom slavish savages dared not even touch lest they should be slain by the thunderbolts of heaven.

Every culture has their myths that people are aware of and share.

There is nothing more innately human than the tendency to transmute what has become customary into what has been divinely ordained.

In civilized communities men's idiosyncrasies are mitigated by the necessity of conforming to certain rules of behavior. Culture is a mask that hides their faces.

It must be recognized that in any culture the source of law is the god of that society