Quotes about tradition

It is one of the touching aspects of our work here in the College [of Arms] that so many of you New World people, up to the eyebrows in all the delights of republicanism, hanker after a link with what is ancient and rubbed by time to a fine sheen. It's more than snobbery; more than romanticism; it's a desire for an ancestry that somehow postulates a posterity and for an existence in the past that is a covert guarantee of immortality in the future.

Precedent is merely the assumption that somebody else, in the past with less information, nevertheless knows better than the man on the spot.

“Only children are intolerant of conventions. They are indispensable to an organized civilization, like discipline to an army, or foundations to a building, or landmarks to a traveler. Without conventions civilization is a handful of water. An army without discipline is a mob. A building without foundations is rubble. A traveler without landmarks is lost.”

Lorcas stated that he opposed not all convention, but only those which he found irksome and pointless.

“I perceive your ideological bias.”

“It is not bias to favor the tried and true ways of the past; it is ordinary common sense.”

The cantons of Shant were alike only in their mutual distrust. Each regarded as Universal Principles its own customs, costumes, jargon, and mannerisms and considered all else eccentricity.

The village would never accept it. It has a policy of never accepting anything. As a happy consequence, it changes about as fast as the rules of chess.

I have respect for mother nature's methods of robustness (billions of years allow most of what is fragile to break); classical thought is more robust (in its respect for the unknown, the epistemic humility) than the modern post-Enlightenment naïve pseudoscientific autism. Thus my classical values make me advocate the triplet of erudition, elegance, and courage; against modernity’s phoniness, nerdiness and philistinism.

Read nothing from the past one hundred years; eat no fruits from the past one thousand years; drink nothing from the past four thousand years (just wine and water); but talk to no ordinary man over forty.

[A]ge is beauty. ...[M]y instinct is to value distilled thought over newer thinking, regardless of its apparent sophistication—another reason to accumulate the hoary volumes by my bedside... For an idea to have survived so many cycles is indicative of its relative fitness. Noise, at least some noise, was filtered out. ...[P]rogress means that some new information is better than past information, not that the average of new information will supplant past information...

The doctrine he was going to be teaching, starting tonight, was not the sort of ideology that would stir souls; no one would die for this religion. It would only attracts converts by promising a return to old tradition and by seeming to be the religion of the future.

Out of respect for custom he treats me as if all women were equally worthless. He gives custom more respect than he gives me.

In general, human societies are not innovative. They are hierarchical and ritualistic. Suggestions for change are greeted with suspicion: they imply an unpleasant future variation in ritual and hierarchy: an exchange of one set of rituals for another, or perhaps for a less structured society with fewer rituals. And yet there are times when societies must change. “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate for the stormy present” was Abraham Lincoln’s description of this truth. Much of the difficulty in attempting to restructure American and other societies arises from this resistance by groups with vested interests in the status quo. Significant change might require those who are now high in the hierarchy to move downward many steps. This seems to them undesirable and is resisted.