Established Practice Quotes

Habit is necessary to give power.

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.

I entirely differ with the Government as to the value of precedents. In this case, as in others, precedents are not mere dusty phrases, which do not substantially affect the question before us. A precedent embalms a principle.

What is today supported by precedents will hereafter become a precedent.

Nothing is more powerful than custom or habit.

What I think is remarkable is the force of habit and the fact that while we can have a practice for doing something that has been repetitive and established over many, many years, it doesn't actually mean there's any virtue to doing it that way at all.

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.

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

I say that habit's but a long practice, friend, and this becomes men's nature in the end.

Habit! that skillful but slow arranger, which starts out by letting our spirit suffer for weeks in a temporary state, but that thespirit is after all happy to discover, for without habit and reduced to its own resources, the spirit would be unable to make any lodgings seem habitable.

Habit! that skilful but slow-moving arranger who begins by letting our minds suffer for weeks on end in temporary quarters, but whom our minds are none the less only too happy to discover at last, for without it, reduced to their own devices, they would be powerless to make any room seem habitable.

Mere precedent is a dangerous source of authority.

Habit had made the custom.

I will say little of the importance of a good education; nor will I stop to prove that the current one is bad. Countless others have done so before me, and I do not like to fill a book with things everybody knows. I will note that for the longest time there has been nothing but a cry against the established practice without anyone taking it upon himself to propose a better one. The literature and the learning of our age tend much more to destruction than to edification.

Custom does often reason overrule.

Logic is a poor guide compared with custom.

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.

I'm kind of a creature of habit. Once I get used to doing things, it's like second nature.

I don't know about habit, we've had a practice of it for as long as I've been doing this program [the Rush Limbaugh show], and a lot of the motivation for it is defensive.

That's the problem with precedents. Even the extreme ones tend to get repeated.

A precedent provides legal authority for an action precisely because it occurred before.

Habit simplifies our movements, makes them accurate, and diminishes fatigue.

It is not the part of prudence to neglect that which antiquity in its long experience has approved and which is also taught by apostolic authority.