Blind Tradition Quotes

For the great enemy of truth is very often not the lie--deliberate, contrived and dishonest--but the myth--persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.

Orthodoxy is a corpse that doesn't know it's dead.

Their very conservatism is secondhand, and they don't know what they are conserving.

Culture is just a shambling zombie that repeats what it did in life; bits of it drop off, and it doesn't appear to notice.

He who does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice.

All evil comes from the old. They grow fat on ideas and young men die of them.

Custom is the law of fools.

Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

Their origin is commonly unknown; for the practice often continues when the cause has ceased, and concerning superstitious ceremonies it is in vain to conjecture; for what reason did not dictate, reason cannot explain.

Throughout my years in business, I discovered something. I would always ask why you do things. The answers that I would invariably get are: 'Oh, that's just the way things are done around here.' Nobody knows why they do what they do. Nobody thinks very deeply about things in business.

Irish Catholics are more interested in the rosary beads than in the rosary.

Those who live not by law would be justified by Custom: but, as common practice is the worst teacher that ever was, so the truth and goodness of things is not to be estimated by the entertainment and acceptance they find in the world.

Traditional wisdom is long on tradition and short on wisdom.

We're making the same mistakes we made 1,000 years ago. So they must be the right ones. So relax.

We must see with our own eyes and not accept any laid-down tradition as if it had some magical power in it.

Proverbs save us the trouble of thinking. What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.

A tradition without intelligence is not worth having.

If Gandhism means simply mechanically turning the spinning wheel, it deserves to be destroyed.

Some fellows get credit for being conservative when they are only stupid.

Whence, then, this worship of the past? The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and authority of the soul.

No man can cause more grief than that one clinging blindly to the vices of his ancestors.

We have all been hearing from childhood of such things as love, peace, charity, equality, and universal brotherhood; but they have become to us mere words without meaning, words which we repeat like parrots, and it has become quite natural for us to do so. We cannot help it.

No mistake is more to be deplored than the conception that a system of morals and religion should derive any portion of its authority either from the circumstance of its novelty or its antiquity, that it should be judged excellent, not because it is reasonable or true, but because no person has ever thought of it before, or because it has been thought of from the beginning of time.

Sometimes we adopt certain beliefs when we're children and use them automatically when we become adults, without ever checking them out against reality. This brings to mind the story of the woman who always cut off the end of the turkey when she put it in the oven. Her daughter asked her why, and her mother responded, "I don't know. My mother always did it." Then she went and asked her mother, who said, "I don't know. My mother always did it." The she went and asked her grandmother, who said, "The oven wasn't big enough."

They knew no better, but I do not propose to follow the example of a barbarian because he was honestly a barbarian.