Ellen Goodman Quotes

The best people to provide valuable information about any society are the children of that society who belong to its culture and are part of its collective conscience.

An atmosphere of beliefs and conceptions has been formed by the labours and struggles of our forefathers, which enables us to breathe amid the various and complex circumstances of our life.

It is of the essence of traditions that they cover or conceal their humble foundations by erecting impressive edifices on them.

If someone were to put a proposition before men bidding them choose, after examination, the best customs in the world, each nation would certainly select its own.

Where I come from, there were traditions with my race and whenever you faced a curve in life, there was always a tradition.

That's why we're doing this, to defend our traditions a little. I don't have anything against it (Halloween), but it's not our tradition.

The Oxford manner is, alas, indefinable; I was going to say indefensible.

One can hardly be Indian and not know that almost every accent, which hand you eat your food with, has some deeper symbolic truth, reality.

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.

Well, one hopes that if you're really related to the core of your particular culture, you have profound commitments to it, and that you are aware of how much you can strain it before you do violence to its essential nature.

I was brought up by the English side of my family, who are very repressed and working class. Absolutely lovely, but very English.

Tradition is a very powerful force.

My life was very Japanese.

Just as the common law derives from ancient precedents - judges' decisions - rather than statutes, baseball's codes are the game's distilled mores. Their unchanged purpose is to show respect for opponents and the game. In baseball, as in the remainder of life, the most important rules are unwritten. But not unenforced.

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

Men will sooner surrender their rights than their customs.

Societies perish when people forget where they come from.

What is a value? Obviously, normal and healthy people are able to appreciate something as a high value for which to live and if necessary, to die, for no other reason than that it was evolved in cultural ritualization and handed down to them by a revered elder.

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

A deep meaning resides in old customs.

I carry the voices of all my family within me, and they were with me there in the jungle.

As an outsider, you don't think of Australia as being old-fashioned - it's only when you've been here for a period of time when you realise there are issues.

Dutch values are based on Christianity, on Judaism, on humanism.

I think our societies - to certain extent, of course, and to different degrees, but almost with no exception - have always been struggling to come to terms with archaic traditions.

When knowledge is cut off from traditional values, it becomes disastrous.