Tradition

Sourced

• You do not understand your own tradition if you do not see it in relation to others.
  • John Searle, "The Storm Over the University", The New York Review of Books (December 6, 1990).

Unsourced

• All persons ought to endeavor to follow what is right, and not what is established.
  • Aristotle

• Often, the less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it.
  • Mark Twain

• ...tradition and custom becomes intertwined and are a strong coercion which directs the society upon fixed lines, and strangles liberty.
  • William Graham Sumner

• In that the wisdom of the few becomes available to the many, there is progress in human affairs; without it, the static routine of tradition continues.
  • Joseph Jastrow

• Again men have been kept back as by a kind of enchantment from progress in science by reverence for antiquity, by the authority of men counted great in philosophy, and then by general consent.
  • Francis Bacon

• Traditionalists are pessimists about the future and optimists about the past.
  • Lewis Mumford

• Tradition is an important help to history, but its statements should be carefully scrutinized before we rely on them.
  • Joseph Addison

• The bird that would soar above the plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings.
  • Kate Chopin

• Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes -- our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking around.
  • Gilbert K. Chesterton

• A precedent embalms a principle.
  • Benjamin Disraeli

• A tradition without intelligence is not worth having.
  • T.S. Elliot

• People should think things out fresh and not just accept conventional terms and the conventional way of doing things.
  • R. Buckminster Fuller