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You must be in tune with the times and prepared to break with tradition.
-James Agee
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In America nothing dies easier than tradition.
-Russell Baker, "New York Times", May 14, 1991
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The assumption must be that those who can see value only in tradition, or versions of it, deny man's ability to adapt to changing circumstances.
-Stephen Bayley
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As soon as tradition has come to be recognized as tradition, it is dead.
-Allan Bloom
The Closing of the American Mind, pt. 1, The Clean Slate, 1987
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Whether he is aware of it or not, every human being dwells in tradition and history. Human memory is this constant dwelling in tradition. It constitutes that fundamental human characteristic of historicity.
-Medard Boss
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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.
-G. K. Chesterton
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The dead govern the living.
-Auguste Comte
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Tradition! We scarcely know the word anymore. We are afraid to be either proud of our ancestors or ashamed of them. We cling to a bourgeois mediocrity which would make it appear we are all Americans, made in the image and likeness of George Washington.
-Dorothy Day
The Long Loneliness, pt. 1, 1952
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I'm an old-fashioned guy... I want to be an old man with a beer belly sitting on a porch, looking at a lake or something.
-Johnny Depp
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A precedent embalms a principle.
-Benjamin Disraeli
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It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labor.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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A tradition without intelligence is not worth having.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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He who would be a man must therefore be a non-conformist.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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People should think things out fresh and not just accept conventional terms and the conventional way of doing things.
-Richard Buckminster Fuller
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There is nothing in the world more stubborn than a corpse: you can hit it, you can knock it to pieces, but you cannot convince it.
-Alexander Herzen
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What greater reassurance can the weak have than that they are like anyone else?
-Eric Hoffer
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Why can't somebody give us a list of things that everybody thinks and nobody says, and another list of things that everybody says and nobody thinks.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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To keep up even a worthwhile tradition means vitiating the idea behind it which must necessarily be in a constant state of evolution: it is mad to try to express new feelings in a mummified form.
-Alfred Jarry
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Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.
-W. Somerset Maugham
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Traditionalists are pessimists about the future and optimists about the past.
-Lewis Mumford
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Conventional people are roused to fury by departures from convention, largely because they regard such departures as a criticism of themselves.
-Bertrand Russell
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Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but religiously follows the new.
-Henry David Thoreau
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I felt there's a wealth in Jewish tradition, a great inheritance. I'd be a jerk not to take advantage of it.
-Herman Wouk, "Time", On his return to Orthodox Judaism, September 5, 1955
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Books about Tradition
