(Tradition) is the democracy of the dead.
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.
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.
A crime persevered in a thousand centuries ceases to be a crime, and becomes a virtue. This is the law of custom, and custom supersedes all other forms of law.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910
Tradition simply means that we need to end what began well and continue what is worth continuing
I learned to do things the way the old-timers did.
Tradition is the thief of power. There is no area of our lives where that theft is more evident than in the area of divine healing.
I adore tradition. I cannot stand habit. Simply to repeat is nothing, also to destroy is nothing. Tradition is never interrupted, we are always evolving but never interrupted.
Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.
I feel proud I was part of the old school and still around in the new school.
I believe history and tradition is something solid and something we can rest on. I am not crazy about putting new spices in chocolate.
Good, old-fashioned ways keep hearts sweet, heads sane, hands busy.
Tradition matters. To me it's not a limiting force; it's a springboard.
It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.
It hurts me to think that people in their rush for everything modern despise all their ancient traditions and ignore them in their lives.
In a contest between new technology and old ways of life, it is the traditional rhythms that will hold. Traditional societies make up more than two-thirds of the world, the two-thirds that will not be going online to "save" time but will remain wedded to the knowledge that if the bus doesn't come that day, it will come someday. After all, there is nothing but time.
We have a maxim in the House of Commons, and written on the walls of our house, that old ways are safest and surest ways.
We're playing the same songs, the same way, that we have for years.
It's going back to old school, the way it was done and I'm finding out there is something different, a little interesting. There is something just a little fresh about it because I haven't seen it done like that in a little while. I'm embracing it, you know.
Customs will often outlive the remembrance of their origin.
Tradition is the illusion of permanance.
There is only one thing better than tradition and that is the original and eternal life out of which all tradition takes its rise.
It would be foolish to despise tradition. But with our growing self-consciousness and increasing intelligence we must begin to control tradition and assume a critical attitude toward it, if human relations are ever to change for the better.
Baseball has so much history and tradition. You can respect it, or you can exploit it for profit, but it's still being made all over the place, all the time.
There's nothing wrong with the classic ways of adapting stuff.
