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"

"Homer's whole language, the language in which he lived, the language that he breathed, because he never saw it, or certainly those who formed his tradition never saw it, in characters on the pages. It was all on the tongue and in the ear"

Robert Fitzgerald, Author

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

Mason Cooley, Writer

"The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato"

Alfred North Whitehead, Mathematician

"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

"However, I began to submit poems to British magazines, and some were accepted. It was a great moment to see my first poems published. It felt like entering a tradition"

Helen Dunmore, Poet

"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

"It is characteristic of the epistemological tradition to present us with partial scenarios and then to demand whole or categorical answers as it were"

Avrum Stroll, Educator

"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 is the illusion of permanance"

Woody Allen, Director

"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

"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

"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

"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

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

Donna Tartt, Novelist

"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

"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

"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

"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

"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

"In America nothing dies easier than tradition"

Russell Baker, Journalist

"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

"There's a great tradition in storytelling that's thousands of years old, telling stories about kings and their palaces, and that's really what I wanted to do"

Aaron Sorkin, Producer

"What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest"

Andy Warhol, Artist

"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

"Free yourself from the rigid conduct of tradition and open yourself to the new forms of probability"

Hans Bender, Psychologist

"Young people discovering their sexuality must know they walk with a strong tradition and that they are not alone. They have a right to information without being pressured"

Jasmine Guy, Actress

"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

"If you're going to use standards as criteria for signing musicians, you can sign thousands. If you're going to use some sort of conceptual interpretation that's based on the tradition of those standards, but is trying to move away from it, you're down to about 10 people or so"

Branford Marsalis, Musician

"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

"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

"The invention of Bob Dylan with his guitar belongs in its way to the same kind of tradition of something meant to be heard, as the songs of Homer"

Robert Fitzgerald, Author

Page 1 of 5