Social Tradition Quotes

Every tradition grows continually more venerable, and the more remote its origins, the more this is lost sight of. The veneration paid the tradition accumulates from generation to generation, until it at last becomes holy and excites awe.

It's surprising to me how many of my friends send Christmas cards, or holiday cards, including my atheist and secular friends.

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

After my mother died, I learned that she'd had a scholarship to the University of Nebraska, but - in kind of a tradition that females don't do things like that - her father prevented her from going. She always said that she wasn't allowed to go to college, but until she died, I never knew that she'd had this scholarship.

America’s gun culture is an invented tradition. It was not present at the creation of America, whenever we fix that point. Rather, it developed in a single generation, among those who experienced the onset of the Civil War. All cultural attributes have a starting point, and a path of development. America’s gun culture is unusual only in that one can determine the precise period in which a specific artifact became central to a nation’s identity and self-conception. Prior to the 1860s, guns were not perceived as a significant component of America’s national identity, essential to its survival.

I view myself more as a traditionalist than a conservative. But I like the traditions, so I tend to try to keep them alive. But I'm open to any kind of political thought - I don't care - I have people that I don't agree with, and I have good friends I don't agree with, but for me personally, I'm more comfortable with the traditional stuff.

In every human society of which we have any record, there are those who teach and those who learn, for learning a way of life is implicit in all human culture as we know it. But the separation of the teacher's role from the role of all adults who inducted the young into the habitual behavior of the group, was a comparatively late invention. Furthermore, when we do find explicit and defined teaching, in primitive societies we find it tied in with a sense of the rareness or the precariousness of some human tradition.

Soccer isn't the same as Bach or Buddhism. But it is often more deeply felt than religion, and just as much a part of the community's fabric, a repository of traditions.

I don't make a Bible argument in the ad, nor have I made a bible argument in the public space. My argument is simple, which is, that for several thousand years in Western civilization, marriage has been the union of one man and one woman. Research is overwhelming that children need mothers and fathers.

The masses of the people are no lovers of changes which run counter to immemorial custom

In Argentina, you do what your father does. If your father plays football, you play football. If your father plays polo, you play polo.

You can't be a real country unless you have a beer.

Tradition is a very powerful force.

The example which Massachusetts and New England offer in the retention of longstanding custom should be given very careful consideration before ruthlessly permitting it to be sacrificed for mercenary considerations.

We have entered a new phase of culture - we may call it the Age of the Cinema - in which the most amazing perfection of scientific technique is being devoted to purely ephemeral objects, without any consideration of their ultimate justification. It seems as though a new society was arising which will acknowledge no hierarchy of values, no intellectual authority, and no social or religious tradition, but which will live for the moment in a chaos of pure sensation.