Customs Quotes

Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free. Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them.

Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

Silence is the greatest ornament of the woman.

I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.

A custom / More honored in the breach than the observance.

Independence .... is loyalty to one's best self and principles, and this is often disloyalty to the general idols and fetishes.

Education proceeds ultimately from the patterns furnished by institutions, customs, and laws.

The American war is over; but this far from being the case with the American revolution. On the contrary, nothing but the first act of the drama is closed. It remains yet to establish and perfect our new forms of government, and to prepare the principles, morals, and manners of our citizens for these forms of government after they are established and brought to perfection.

A succinct summary of the tragic vision was given by historians Will and Ariel Durant: Out of every hundred new ideas ninety-nine or more will probably be inferior to the traditional responses which they propose to replace. No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for these are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history.

The distribution of wealth, therefore, depends on the laws and customs of society.

The law is an adroit mixture of customs that are beneficial to society, and could be followed even if no law existed, and others that are of advantage to a ruling minority, but harmful to the masses of men, and can be enforced on them only by terror.

Religion does not require women to veil their hands, feet and faces or enjoin any special type of veil. Tribal custom must not impose itself on the free will of the individual

The old order changeth, yielding place to new; And God fulfils himself in many ways, Lest one good custom should corrupt the world..

It takes far more courage to violate a custom than a law.

Ceremonies are the outworks of manners.

The dead made this world. We didn't make it. They made the poetry and the songs and the customs.

Some laws are not written, but are more decisive than any written law.

A man who goes into a country must comply with the ceremonies in use there.

A deep meaning resides in old customs.

… 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.

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.

Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.

When I travel abroad, because I'm Columbian, I'm always one that they check twice and security and I'm the one that they open my bag and the one they pull to the side to check the visa.

Force sometimes does change things. I see not reason to believe that slavery in America would not have continued to the present day if it did not meet a violent end.