Tradition Quotes: Timeless Wisdom and Cultural Insights

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

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

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

"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

"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

"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

"Tradition is the illusion of permanance"

Woody Allen, Director

"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

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

Scott Adams, Cartoonist

"The intellectual tradition is one of servility to power, and if I didn't betray it I'd be ashamed of myself"

Noam Chomsky, Activist

"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

"As beautiful as simplicity is, it can become a tradition that stands in the way of exploration"

Laura Nyro, Musician

"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

"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

"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

"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

"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

"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

"In America nothing dies easier than tradition"

Russell Baker, Journalist

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

Donna Tartt, Novelist

"And so, today, if the state can no longer appeal to the old moral principles that belong to the Christian tradition, it will be forced to create a new official faith and new moral principles which will be binding on its citizens"

Christopher Dawson, Writer

"As I have pointed out, it is the Christian tradition that is the most fundamental element in Western culture. It lies at the base not only of Western religion, but also of Western morals and Western social idealism"

Christopher Dawson, Writer

"The only way to be true to our American tradition is to maintain absolute governmental neutrality regarding religious beliefs and practices"

Bill Bradley, Politician

"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

"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 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

"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

"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

"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

"Most painting in the European tradition was painting the mask. Modern art rejected all that. Our subject matter was the person behind the mask"

Robert Motherwell, Artist

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

Joyce Carol Oates, Novelist

"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

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