Established Practices Quotes

Old things are always in good repute, present things in disfavor.

Often the less there is to justify a traditional custom the harder it is to get rid it.

Habit is the enormous flywheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision. Full half the time of such a man goes to the deciding, or regretting, of matters which ought to be so ingrained in him as practically not to exist for his consciousness at all.

Successful innovations become conventions.

...how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity!

Never be a pioneer. It's the early Christian that gets the fattest lion.

The medical profession is - and knows itself to be - endemically conservative and conformist.

Pursuits become habits.

We ought not to be over-anxious to encourage innovation in cases of doubtful improvement, for an old system must ever have two advantages over a new one; it is established, and it is understood.

Stability means respecting precedents.

Tradition implies authority, conformity, imitation, following.

A critique does not consist in saying that things aren't good the way they are. It consists in seeing on just what type of assumptions, of familiar notions, of established and unexamined ways of thinking the accepted practices are based... To do criticism is to make harder those acts which are now too easy.

Art flouts convention. Convention became convention because it works.

We have a saying in the House of Commons; that old ways are the safest and surest ways.

Custom is custom: it is built of brass, boiler-iron, granite; facts, reasonings, arguments have no more effect upon it than the idle winds have upon Gibraltar.

So much in design is presented as a big miracle when it's just a repetition of what's been happening for 80 years.

All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits.

Man is very much a creature of habit. A thing that rarely strikes his senses will generally have but little influence upon his mind. A government continually at a distance and out of sight, can hardly be expected to interest the sensations of the people. The inference is, that the authority of the Union, and the affections of the citizens towards it, will be strengthened rather than weakened by its extension to what are called matters of internal concern.

Scientific advertising has altered many old plans and conceptions. It has proved many long established methods to be folly

Habit is a good thing for the human race. ... You have to spend so much energy just getting through the day when you have no habits that you don't have any left for productive labor.

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 those are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history.

I think a lot of things that are the norm, that are very systematic, don't work.

Mere lack of success does not discredit a method, for there are many things that determine and perpetuate our sanctified ways of doing things besides their success in reaching their proposed ends.

There is nothing sacred about convention; there is nothing sacred about primitive passions or whims; but the fact that a convention exists indicates that a way of living has been devised capable of maintaining itself.

We shall return to proven ways - not because they are old, but because they are true.