Brian Eno Quotes

As soon as tradition has come to be recognized as tradition, it is dead.

Saturdays and Sundays, America in the year 2009 does not in some ways differ significantly from the country that existed almost 50 years ago. This is truly sad.

Nothing is more difficult, in general, than to make a nation perceive anything as true, or seek its own interest, in any manner but as its forefathers have opined and acted.

We have 5000-year-old history which is now almost a part of our DNA. How do you break that? America, for example, doesn't have that history behind it. It romanticizes rebellion. We look down upon rebellion. It's an insult. To think out-of-the-box is looked down upon here.

Almost always tradition is nothing but a record and a machine-made imitation of the habits that our ancestors created. The average conservative is a slave to the most incidental and trivial part of his forefathers glory - to the archaic formula which happened to express their genius or the eighteenth-century contrivance by which for a time it was served.

England is a country where people stay exactly as they are. The soul does not receive the slightest jolt.

I'm English and love England. Whenever I'm there, I'm always seeing the present but feeling its past.

Preserving tradition has become a nice hobby, like stamp collecting.

France is an old country that needs to wake up.

I do think there is this danger that our society has made its peace with decline. I'd like to jolt them out of their complacency a little bit.

France has chosen to ignore the great transformation of the 21st century and cultivate a [culture of] status quo and rigidity.

For my part, I do not believe that the country is in danger. I think England is safe in the race of men who inhabit her; that she is safe in something much more precious than her accumulated capital — her accumulated experience; she is safe in her national character, in her fame, in the traditions of a thousand years, and in that glorious future which I believe awaits her.

For Conservatives, all disputes over law, liberty and justice are addressed to a historic and existing community. The root of politics, they believe, is attachment - the motive in human beings that binds them to the place, the customs, the history and the people who are theirs.

Change is not what we expect from religious people. They tend to love the past more than the present or the future.

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.

It sometimes occurs to me that the British have more heritage than isgood for them.

...you will do more harm than good by attempting to supplant old dogmas and customs with new dogmas. It will be the same in the end except that the old is less militant, less dangerous than a new order imposed by enthusiasts.

Tradition, if not constantly recreated, can be as much a millstone as a mill-wheel.

This doctrine ['that the condition of man cannot be ameliorated, that what has been must ever be, and that to secure ourselves where we are we must tread with awful reverence in the footsteps of our fathers']is the genuine fruit of the alliance between Church and State, the tenants of which finding themselves but too well in their present condition, oppose all advances which might unmask their usurpations and monopolies of honors, wealth and power, and fear every change as endangering the comforts they now hold.

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

Conservatism has always meant more to me than simply sticking up for private property & free enterprise. It has also meant defending our heritage & preserving our values.

An Old World revolution is only a movement around a motionless center; it never breaks out of the circle. Firm in the center is belief in Authority.

I think some people are just very passionate that things remain the way they were when they were kids.

It hurts me to think that people in their rush for everything modern despise all their ancient traditions and ignore them in their lives.

Tradition is the albatross around the neck of progress.