Tradition Quotes: Timeless Wisdom and Cultural Insights

"We are all part of a tradition, at least we depend on the past"

"Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition"

"Preserving tradition has become a nice hobby, like stamp collecting"

"Monty Python crowd; half of them came from Cambridge, and half of them came from Oxford. But, there seems to be this jewel, this sort of two headed tradition of doing comedy, of doing sketches, and that kind of thing"

Rowan Atkinson, Comedian

"I don't really know of the Jewish tradition of comedy, only the Jewish tradition of not keeping your mouth shut. Complaining about all that is hard, unfair or ridiculous in life-having strong feelings, and not being able to suppress them. That, to me, is Jewish"

Fred Melamed, Actor

"Jackass: The Movie is great. I think it's in the tradition of physical comedy, which I'm really interested in. Its relationship to gravity, and how gravity acts on the body"

Matthew Barney, Artist

"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"

Robert Delaunay, Artist

"Miles Davis fully embraced possibilities and delved into it. He was criticized heavily from the jazz side. He was supposed to be part of a tradition, but he didn't consider himself part of a tradition"

Bill Laswell, Musician

"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 that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around"

Gilbert K. Chesterton, Writer

"Tradition is the illusion of permanance"

Woody Allen, Director

"Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse"

Winston Churchill, Statesman

"It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition"

Henry James, Writer

"We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's dam is the history we make today"

Henry Ford, Businessman

"It was easy to persecute me without people feeling ashamed. It was easy to vilify me and project me as a woman who was not following the tradition of a 'good African woman' and as a highly educated elitist who was trying to show innocent African women ways of doing things that were not acceptable to African men"

Wangari Maathai, Activist

"Marriage brings one into fatal connection with custom and tradition, and traditions and customs are like the wind and weather, altogether incalculable"

Søren Kierkegaard, Philosopher

"To the extent that I come from a deeply religious tradition and have been contending with those beginnings all of my life - that constitutes the subject of much of my early fiction"

Chaim Potok, Author

"I think Europeans have enough tradition and respect for the experience and body of work of an actress that they don't sell out to the new ones"

Kathleen Turner, Actress

"Every heart that has beat strongly and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind"

Robert Louis Stevenson, Writer

"In America nothing dies easier than tradition"

Russell Baker, Journalist

"I love the tradition of Dickens, where even the most minor walk-on characters are twitching and particular and alive"

Donna Tartt, Novelist

"Among those who are satisfactory in this respect it is desirable to have represented as great a diversity of intellectual tradition, social milieu and personal character as possible"

Talcott Parsons, Sociologist

"We still have a tradition certainly in English television; it's faded a bit in the last five years, but we still have a tradition where the important thing is the quality and the challenging nature of the programming"

Rowan Atkinson, Comedian

"For 180 years, we voted in English. That is the true American tradition, and this amendment is true to our heritage, not what has existed unnaturally for the last 20 years"

Spencer Bachus, Politician

"Many mathematicians derive part of their self-esteem by feeling themselves the proud heirs of a long tradition of rational thinking; I am afraid they idealize their cultural ancestors"

Edsger Dijkstra, Scientist

"Our enemy is by tradition our savior, in preventing us from superficiality"

Joyce Carol Oates, Novelist

"In the same period, Polish literature also underwent some significant changes. From social-political literature, which had a great tradition and strong motivation to be that way, Polish literature changed its focus to a psychological rather than a social one"

Andrzej Wajda, Director

"Tradition wears a snowy beard, romance is always young"

John Greenleaf Whittier, Poet

"Anybody who had come up with a new concept would have been under suspicion for being out of step with the tradition or out of step with the teachings of the church"

John Templeton, Businessman

"There has been a strong tradition in this country that it is not the function of the military to educate the public on political issues"

J. William Fulbright, Politician

"The territorial state is such an ancient form of society - here in Europe it dates back thousands of years - that it is now protected by the sanctity of age and the glory of tradition. A strong religious feeling mingles with the respect and the devotion to the fatherland"

Christian Lous Lange, Politician

"Informed decision-making comes from a long tradition of guessing and then blaming others for inadequate results"

Scott Adams, Cartoonist

"But an innovation, to grow organically from within, has to be based on an intact tradition, so our idea is to bring together musicians who represent all these traditions, in workshops, festivals, and concerts, to see how we can connect with each other in music"

Yo-Yo Ma, Musician

"For God's sake build not your faith upon Tradition, 'tis as rotten as a rotten Post"

Nicholas Culpeper, Scientist

"These maxims and the art of interpreting them may be said to constitute the premisses of science but I prefer to call them our scientific beliefs. These premisses or beliefs are embodied in a tradition, the tradition of science"

Michael Polanyi, Scientist

"In the true sense one's native land, with its background of tradition, early impressions, reminiscences and other things dear to one, is not enough to make sensitive human beings feel at home"

Emma Goldman, Activist

"The trouble with the performance poets is that they don't seem to have read anything. So there is not a real sense of the poetic tradition in their work"

Peter Davison, Actor

"The tradition of Russian literature is also an eastern tradition of learning poetry and prose by heart"

Ryszard Kapuscinski, Journalist

"Certainly the emphasis I place in this chapter on coordination of behavior and cooperation to mutual benefit is something that ought to be very congenial to people in the libertarian tradition"

Robert Nozick, Philosopher

"There was an honorable tradition of using anonymous sources that was ruined by Jayson Blair"

Ted Rall, Cartoonist

"The fate of every democracy, of every government based on the sovereignty of the people, depends on the choices it makes between these opposite principles, absolute power on the one hand, and on the other the restraints of legality and the authority of tradition"

John Acton, Historian

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