George Santayana Quotes

Man is made of the wholly common, and custom is his nurse; woe then to them who lay irreverent hands on his old house-furniture, the dear inheritance from his forefathers: For time consecrates, and what is gray with age becomes religion.

Each age has deemed the new-born year the fittest time for festal cheer.

You seek help from the elders. A society with elders is healthy. It's not always that way in the West.

These are classic, perennial ideals we are dealing with.

I would say that the West is very young, it's very corrupt. We're not very wise. And I think we're hopeful that there is a place that is ancient and wise and open and filled with light.

In these confused times, the role of classical music is at the very core of the struggle to reassert cultural and ethical values that have always characterized our country and for which we have traditionally been honored and respected outside our shores.

We need to go back to the way it was 30 years ago, when everybody had Grandma and Grandpa, and we were willing to pass moral judgments about right and wrong.

This country was founded on a core set of family values. These values should not be discouraged and blatantly undermined by the airing of offensive material on broadcast television and radio.

My mother has an incredible rigidity, which is very Catholic.

I'm the proof - you can't throw away tradition.

The masses of the people are no lovers of changes which run counter to immemorial custom

Tradition wears a snowy beard.

I do think evolution is an important aspect of keeping a tradition alive. If it freezes and remains very static in its form, it dies, and so a natural evolution has to occur.

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

Many people who attack me know so little of that larger Tradition, and end up being not very traditional at all. When you invoke the whole and great Tradition, you end up scaring people who call 1950 America "traditional" Christianity. It is just what they are used to in their one limited lifetime.

Despite my being an old gypsy there is a tendency to respectability inherent in old age.

Conservatism is the antidote to tyranny. It's the only one. It's based on thousands of years of human experience. There is nothing narrow about the conservative philosophy. It's a liberating philosophy. It is a magnificent philosophy. It is a philosophy for the ages, for all times.

There's a Chinese proverb that says it all: Painting is an old man's art.

Our inheritance of well-founded, slowly conceived codes of honor, morals and manners, the passionate convictions which so many hundreds of millions share together of the principles of freedom and justice, are far more precious to us than anything which scientific discoveries could bestow.

Leave it as it is. You can not improve on it. You can only mar it. The ages have been at work on it and man can only mar it. What you can do is keep it for your children, your children's children and for all who come after you.

I was asked whether I was trying to restore Victorian values. I said straight out I was. And I am.

For the anointed, traditions are likely to be seen as the dead hand of the past, relics of a less enlightened age, and not as the distilled experience of millions who faced similar human vicissitudes before.

Every man remembers his childhood as a kind of mythical age, just as every nation's childhood is its mythical age.

Heterosexual marriage is the heart of our civilization.

The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.