Tradition Quotes

"A poet clings to his own tradition and avoids internationalism"

"Now, the instrumentation in the jazz band and the jazz dance band has gone through many evolutions. For instance, in the 'twenties the tradition was two or three saxophones"

Gerry Mulligan, Musician

"What everybody misses here is that we are doing the same thing my father did. He licensed and litigated and protected his property, and we have to follow the same tradition, because the way the law reads, if you don't protect it, you lose it"

Dexter S. King

"What is the source of all this trouble? I'm saying that the source is basically in thought. Many people would think that such a statement is crazy, because thought is the one thing we have with which to solve our problems. That's part of our tradition"

David Bohm, Scientist

"The American patriots of today continue the tradition of the long line of patriots before them, by helping to promote liberty and freedom around the world"

John Linder, Politician

"Almost every venerable tradition at a men's club starts out as a joke"

Joe Bob Briggs, Critic

"You must be in tune with the times and prepared to break with tradition"

James Agee, Novelist

"We always had to play the game and play for the team. It is a Kent tradition"

Frank Woolley, Athlete

"In 1978, the tradition of running from village to village with a message was revived. that first run was from Davis to Los Angeles, a distance of 500 miles"

Dennis Banks, Educator

"I do not come bearing a party label on my sleeve - or a quick fix in my back pocket. I do not come with a rigid ideology in my heart - or a soul that tells me to go it alone. I do not come to uproot tradition - or to be imprisoned by it"

Ted Kulongoski, Politician

"Now, if King Crimson accepts responsibility for innovating its own tradition, you can't accept responsibility for the audience. And there is an enormous tangible weight of expectation, which comes from an audience attending a King Crimson concert"

Robert Fripp, Musician

"In Europe, there is so much tradition, and everyone has established ideas as to what art should be and what it has always been"

Esa-Pekka Salonen, Musician

"The Faculty of Technology of Tohoku University is renowned for its tradition of practical studies"

Koichi Tanaka, Scientist

"When I think of the library of Alexandria and of the fact that, although it burnt down, people continue to sort the letters of the alphabet according to that tradition, then that makes certain expressions of modernity, even of interventions on the textual level, possible"

Alexander Kluge, Director

"In those countries with centuries of a craft tradition behind their building methods, techniques are tightly coordinated under the direction of the architect"

Arthur Erickson, Architect

"Leadership is particularly necessary to ensure ready acceptance of the unfamiliar and that which is contrary to tradition"

Cyril Falls, Historian

"Anything well written with good language and clarity and honesty is worth doing. It comes out of the same tradition as Shakespeare"

Michael Moriarty, Actor

"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

"I don't like traditions, I am very personal, very independent, I don't like intimate ladies, I mean in German lieder there's a lot of copy, a lot of imitation, a lot of tradition, and this I have put it aside"

Victoria de los Angeles, Musician

"We use a Native American tradition of the talking stick. You sit and pass it around and whoever has the stick has to talk. Some people just hold it. Others really share"

Lisa Bonet, Actress

"Our tradition of political thought had its definite beginning in the teachings of Plato and Aristotle. I believe it came to a no less definite end in the theories of Karl Marx"

Hannah Arendt, Historian

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

Laura Nyro, Musician

"If I belong to a tradition, it is a tradition that makes the masterpiece tell the performer what to do, and not the performer telling the piece what it should be like, or the composer what he ought to have composed"

Alfred Brendel, Musician

"Testimony is an integral part of the Black religious tradition. It is the occasion where the believer stands before the community of faith in order to give account of the hope that is in him or her"

James Hal Cone, Theologian

"I believe that all poetry is formal in that it exists within limits, limits that are either inherited by tradition or limits that language itself imposes"

Mark Strand, Poet

"It's a fun day, a day which kicks off the start of our tour, it's got great tradition - Australian cricketers just love tradition - and it's been a really pleasant day"

Matthew Hayden, Athlete

"Well, it's a - I don't want to disappoint you, but it's a time worn tradition of Australian Governments over many years not to get into any discussion about that aspect of intelligence matters"

Alexander Downer, Politician

"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, Novelist

"But, I don't want to assume that our tradition of excellence is a guarantee of future excellence"

Dave Heineman, Politician

"I'm very much a traditionalist, but I think it's important to know about tradition so that you can evolve the music you are deciding to make"

Chely Wright, Musician

"Because it's not only that a child is inseparable from the family in which he lives, but that the lives of families are determined by the community in which they live and the cultural tradition from which they come"

Bernice Weissbourd

"My true function within a society which embraces all of us is to continue an age-old tradition. This tradition is to create images from the depths of the imagination and to give them form, whether visual, intellectual or musical"

Michael Tippett, Composer

"To recover a spiritual tradition in which creation, and the study of creation, matters would be to inaugurate new possibilities between spirituality and science that would shape the paradigms for culture, its institution, and its people"

Matthew Fox

"We have a long tradition in this state of caring for our neighbors - it is truly an Iowa value"

Thomas Vilsack, Politician

"Under normal conditions the research scientist is not an innovator but a solver of puzzles, and the puzzles upon which he concentrates are just those which he believes can be both stated and solved within the existing scientific tradition"

Thomas Kuhn, Writer

"In 1979, Alien came out and Sigourney was in it with a bunch a guys. Nobody at that time expected the woman to be the hero, so that was a tradition that started"

Sanaa Lathan, Actress

"I suggest that what we want to do is not to leave to posterity a great institution, but to leave behind a great tradition of journalism ably practiced in our time"

Henry R. Luce, Editor

"Every generation deals with the breaking down of its tradition, and I think that they rediscovered the film"

Norman Jewison, Director

"This character in the film, these things that he says which sound like advice and wise things, they are very common for Orientals. It's all the tradition"

Omar Sharif, Actor

"Without words to objectify and categorize our sensations and place them in relation to one another, we cannot evolve a tradition of what is real in the world"

Ruth Hubbard, Scientist

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