John Varvatos Quotes

One must always maintain one's connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it.

Hold fast to the best of the past and move fast to the best of the future.

One does not substitute oneself for the past, one merely adds to it a new link.

Tradition means taking account of a wonderful history but remembering that everybody today looks to the future.

We need to open up the future. We also need to keep everything valuable from the past.

I am a traditionalist, and I'm an innovator. Most of what I do is to weigh change and legislate to the best of my ability on what should change and what should not. Do I have a respect for tradition? Of course I do. Do I have a blind belief in it? No.

At every crossroads on the path that leads to the future, tradition has placed 10,000 men to guard the past.

Slumber not in the tents of your fathers. The world is advancing.

Liberalism is the philosophy for our time, because it does not try to conserve every tradition of the past, because it does not apply to new problems the old doctrinaire solutions, because it is prepared to experiment and innovate and because it knows that the past is less important than the future.

We should not fear what is new, but we should not throw out that which is in the past but is still valuable.

We can't be beholden to the past.

I think continuity is a good thing. But change is sometimes good, too.

Traditions are lovely thingsto create traditions, that is, not to live off them.

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.

To continue in one path is to go backward.

If God had intended that man should go backward, he would have given him eyes in the back of his head.

Tradition and heritage are all dead people's baggage, stop carrying it. Move forward.

There is no new world that you make without the old world.

He who does not move with the times is a dead man

With smoking axle hot with speed, with steeds of fire and steam, Wide-waked To-day leaves Yesterday behind him like a dream. Still, from the hurrying train of Life, fly backward far and fast The milestones of the fathers, the landmarks of the past. But human hearts remain unchanged: the sorrow and the sin, The loves and hopes and fears of old, are to our own akin; And if, in tales our fathers told, the songs our mothers sung, Tradition wears a snowy beard, Romance is always young.

Conservatism cherishes tradition; innovation fetishizes novelty. They tug in different directions, the one toward the past, the other toward the future.

We must not be hampered by yesterday's myths in concentrating on today's needs.

What we call wisdom is the result of all the wisdom of past ages. Our best institutions are like young trees growing upon the roots of the old trunks that have crumbled away.

Be not the first by whom the new are tried, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.

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