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.
We've surrounded the most vital and commonplace human function with a vast morass of taboos, convention, hypocrisy, and plain claptrap.
Custom creates the whole of equity, for the simple reason that it is accepted.
Authority is by nothing so much strengthened and confirmed as by custom; for no man easily distrusts the things which he and all men have been always bred up to.
Customs may not be as wise as laws, but they are always more popular.
A critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It is a matter of pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought the practices that we accept rest.
What used to be considered conservative values... are increasingly becoming more mainstream values.
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.
Traditionalists often study what is taught, not what there is to create.
Those which we call necessary institutions are simply no more than institutions to which we have become accustomed.
Not only does "orthodox" no longer mean being right, it practically means being wrong.
In my day, there were things that were done, and things that were not done, and there was even a way of doing things that were not done.
