Robert E. Howard Quotes

Where a bad custom has been in existence for any length of time, most people grow to regard it as part of the order of nature.

Custom is our nature …

Customs represent the experience of mankind.

Everything is arranged so that it be this way, this is what is called culture.

And we had our own laws. I mean, I wrote them. And we had our own customs, and traditions, and proprieties.

It is my opinion that whatever is the custom of a nation, and is practiced by the first characters of that nation towards their chief, cannot degrade strangers who perform the same.

Custom meets us at the cradle and leaves us only at the tomb.

Custom is our nature. What are our natural principles but principles of custom?

To me, I learned along the way, you know, culture is behavior. That's all it is; culture is people's behaviors.

The way of the world is to make laws, but follow custom.

The primary function of myth is to validate an existing social order. Myth enshrines conservative social values, raising tradition on a pedestal. It expresses and confirms, rather than explains or questions, the sources of cultural attitudes and values.

In the stable periods of history, meaning was supplied in the context of a coherent community and traditionally prescribed patterns of culture. Today we cannot count on any such inheritance.

Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor.

… a country's laws are written upon paper, and that its customs are engraved upon brass. One may play with the one, but not with the other. It is less risky for a stranger to dance upon our Constitution in the public square than to affront one of our solidified customs. The one is merely eminently respectable, the other is sacred.

Do not overthrow the custom that has made it all the way to you.

Culture is simply a shared way of doing something with passion.

You like to think that you're bigger than your traditions and customs, but they form who you are.

We have a unique culture.

The empire of custom is most mighty.

Humans become human through intense learning not just of survival skills but of customs and social mores, kinship and social laws-that is, culture.

In this great society wide lying around us, a critical analysis would find very few spontaneous actions. It is almost all custom and gross sense.

Cultures grow on the vine of tradition.

But to my mind, though I am native here, And to the manner born, it is a custom, More honored in the breach than the observance.

Culture is the tacit agreement to let the means of subsistence disappear behind the purpose of existence.

Experience supplies painful proof that traditions once called into being are first called useful, then they become necessary. At last they are too often made idols, and all must bow down to them or be punished.