Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

(Tradition) is the democracy of the dead.

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.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century we abandoned tradition, it's at that point that I intend to renew it because the present is built on the past just as the past was built on the times that went before it.

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

We strain to listen to the ghosts and echoes of our inexpressibly wise past, and we have an obligation to maintain these places, to provide these sanctuaries, so that people may be in the presence of forces larger than those of the moment.

Tradition is only democracy extended through time; it may be defined as an extension of the franchise. Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who are merely walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our father.

The endless legacy of the past to the present is the secret source of human genius.

The past is our treasure. Its works, whether we know them or not, flourish in our lives with whatever strength they had. From it we draw provision for our journey, the collected wisdom whose harvests are all ours to reap and carry with us, though we may never live again in the fields that grew them.

I think the history and the past we have is just an energy we've built up to do what we do now.

I believe that patterns tend to repeat themselves and there are connections between the past and the present. There is the old proverb that reads, 'You can't know where you're going if you don't know where you've been'. For me, history is like that. When you take history and combine it with myth, then you get mystery.

It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.

Monuments are for the living, not the dead.

History isn’t just what happened before we came on the scene. We are a part of history..

Oh yes. And a great many of them still do.

History matters.

Tradition matters. To me it's not a limiting force; it's a springboard.

I believe history and tradition is something solid and something we can rest on. I am not crazy about putting new spices in chocolate.

Why will we be imposed on by antiquity?

We live not by things, but by the meaning of things. It is needful to transmit the passwords from generation to generation.

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.

Preserve your history and become everlasting; receive new life from the times that have gone by.

Customs will often outlive the remembrance of their origin.

I am not taking away the historical legacy, but it should not become a burden.

All of a sudden America wasn't about hamburgers and hot rods anymore. It was about the Mayflower and Plymouth Rock. It was about something that had happened for two minutes four hundred years ago, instead of everything that had happened since. Instead of everything that was happening now!

History dies without the present. There is no future without the path made to it by the past.