Questioning Tradition Quotes

Question everything, even if it represents generations of conventional wisdom.

We have a lot of sort of received historical ways of viewing portraiture. And I suppose in some way I'm sort of questioning that by toying with the rules of the game.

Wherever I see people doing something the way it's always been done, the way it's 'supposed' to be done, following the same old trends, well, that's just a big red flag to me to go look somewhere else.

Man must not check his reason by tradition, but, contrariwise, must check tradition by reason.

Curiosity and irreverence go together. Curiosity cannot exist without the other. Curiosity asks, "Is this true?" "Just because this has always been the way, is the best or right way of life, the best or right religion, political or economic value, morality?" To the questioner, nothing is sacred. He detests dogma, defies any finite definition of morality, rebels against any repression of a free, open search of ideas no matter where they may lead. He is challenging, insulting, agitating, discrediting. He stirs unrest.

When Fashion hath once Established, what Folly or craft began, Custom makes it Sacred, and 'twill be thought impudence or madness, to contradict or question it.

The despotism of custom is on the wane. We are not content to know that things are; we ask whether they ought to be.

I want it so that every minister will be not a parrot, not an owl sitting upon a dead limb of the tree of knowledge and hooting the hoots that have been hooted for eighteen hundred years. But I want it so that each one can be an investigator, a thinker; and I want to make his congregation grand enough so that they will not only allow him to think, but will demand that he shall think, and give to them the honest truth of his thought.

In the first round of work simplification...you can reasonably expect a 30 to 50 percent reduction...To implement the actual simplification, you must question why each step is performed. Typically, you will find that many steps exist in your work flow for no good reason. Often they are there by tradition or because formal procedure ordains it, and nothing practical ordains it.

A great literature is thus chiefly the product of doubting and inquiring minds in revolt against the immovable certainties of the nation.

Disobedience was man's Original Virtue.

I call myself a traditionalist, although I have fought against tradition all my life.

If you have always done it that way, it is probably wrong.

As every past generation has had to disenthrall itself from an inheritance of truisms and stereotypes, so in our own time we must move on from the reassuring repetition of stale phrases to a new, difficult, but essential confrontation with reality. For the great enemy of truth is very often not the lie-deliberate, contrived and dishonest-but the myth-persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. Mythology distracts us everywhere.

What if custom is wrong? demanded the part of her that believed in the code of chivalry. A knight must set things right.