John Ciardi Quotes

An expert is someone who knows a lot about the past.

Laws are subordinate to custom.

Tradition wears a snowy beard.

You have to follow the old rule for a while. In fact, once you master the old rule, you are then the master-and masters get to change things.

Convention is the ruler of all.

I don't just write letters. I write laws.

Logic is a poor guide compared with custom.

The reason that we have rules is so that sometimes they can be suspended.

Creativity and innovation always builds on the past. The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it. Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past. Ours is less and less a free society.

No, traditions and norms aren't rules in the Constitution. There's a difference between a tradition and a law.

For those who have only to obey, law is what the sovereign commands. For the sovereign, in the throes of deciding what he ought to command, this view of law is singularly empty of light and leading. In the dispersed sovereignty of modern states, and especially in times of rapid social change, law must look to the future as well as to history and precedent, and to what is possible and right as well as to what is actual.

Law is error, you see. It's an attempt to write down a lot of things everyone ought to know anyway.

We are nothing but by the law.

You have to be a master to teach.

With customes wee live well, but Lawes undoe us.

I suppose . . . in writing you can't have regrets. I mean, you just get it down the way it was . . . it's only wishful thinking that things could be other than they were.

Writing laws is easy, but governing is difficult.

It's fair to say that if you have a lot of experience, your power is greater. You have more of an opportunity to roll up your sleeves with younger directors.

As an architect, I try to be guided not by habit but by a conscious sense of the past-by precedent, thoughtfully considered...As an artist, I frankly write about what I like in architecture: complexity and contradiction. From what we find we like-what we are easily attracted to-we can learn much of what we really are.

And in my classes, I will talk most of the time, and you will listen most of the time. Because you may be smart, but I've been smart longer.

The will of the people shall be the law of the land

Policy sits above conscience.

When you get a big crisis, everyone wants somebody with some experience and some credibility.

How do you prevent people from doing inappropriate things? We can write laws. But at the end of the day, I actually wonder what the board was doing.