Social Continuity Quotes

Without a generation of civilized people to study history, to preserve its records, to absorb its lessons and relate them to its own problems, history, too, would lose its meaning.

Society exists through a process of transmission quite as much as biological life. This transmission occurs by means of communication of habits of doing, thinking, and feeling from the older to the younger.

...little has changed in our New York neighborhoods except the faces, the names, and the languages spoken. The same decent values of hard work and accomplishment and service to city and nation still exist.

I still have a book club with my friends from when I was 5. That's the privilege of growing up in a place where people want to remain. It's a huge gift.

However, if we leave the industrial machinery and their energy-distribution networks and leave them also all the people who have routine jobs operating the industrial machinery and distributing its products, and we take away from all the industrial countries all their ideologies and all the politicians and political machine workers, people would keep right on eating. Possibly getting on a little better than before.

A nation which has forgotten its past can have no future.

When a tradition gathers enough strength to go on for centuries, you don't just turn it off one day.

A tradition is kept alive only by something being added to it.

Time is an enormous, long river, and I’m standing in it, just as you’re standing in it. My elders are the tributaries, and everything they thought and every struggle they went through and everything they gave their lives to, and every song they created, and every poem that they laid down flows down to me – and if I take the time to ask, and if I take the time to see, and if I take the time to reach out, I can build that bridge between my world and theirs. I can reach down into that river and take out what I need to get through this world

When I was young, you went to school, dealt with your friends and drama, went home, did your homework, went to bed, and started over the next day. But that social interaction that happens at school doesn't end now - it goes until the minute you go to bed and starts again when you wake up.

Society proceeds like the ocean. After a disaster, it resume its wonted level and rhythms; its devouring interests efface all traces of damage.

I say it is indispensable to look ahead of and behind oneself in the present. If there is such a thing as tradition, and I believe there is, it can only exist in the sense of the most profound movements of culture.

What's interesting to me, is a moving someone through time; in a way, history is part of my landscape. And it fascinates me that history can be so easily reflected in what happens today.

I believe history and tradition is something solid and something we can rest on. I am not crazy about putting new spices in chocolate.

The people will perish if their scholars pass away.

As we know from the study of history, no new system can impose itself upon a previous one without incorporating many of the elements to be found in the latter.

If the past has nothing to say to the present, history may go on sleeping undisturbed in the closet where the system keeps its old disguises.

I love being in a public space where teenagers are talking. And the funny thing is that it hasn't changed that much. There's certainly slang that I'm not familiar with, but among the average teen, it's still the same.

He poured the tumbler full. Drink up, he said. The world goes on. We have dancing nightly and this night is no exception. The straight and the winding way are one and now that you are here what do the years count since last we two met together? Men's memories are uncertain and the past that was differs little from the past that was not.

I believe in traditions; I believe in the idea of things being passed between generations and the slow transmission of cultural values through tradition.

The nature of human beings never changes; it is immutable. The present generation of children and the present generation of young adults from the age of thirteen to eighteen is, therefore, no different from that of their great-great-grandparents. Political fads come and go; theories rise and fall; the scientific 'truth' of today becomes the discarded error of tomorrow.

Teens are dealing with the same problems now in the '90s as they did back in the '70s, the only real difference is the clothes we wear!

The Constitution needs allegiance and loyalty and renewal and understanding with each generation, or else it's not going to last.

America is a transplanted place. Families split and people travel 1,000 miles for a job, but the South is not yet like that. People live for three or four generations in the same town, even the same house.

I have never - I have never let go of my childhood contacts. My best friends from childhood are still my best friends.