Quotes about Tradition

The man for whom law exists -- the man of forms, the Conservative, is a tame man.

I don't know much about history, and I wouldn't give a nickel for all the history in the world. History is more or less bunk. It is a tradition. We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history we make today.

An idea is not necessarily good because it is old, or necessarily bad because it is new, but if an old idea works, then the weight of the evidence is all in its favor. Ideas are of themselves extraordinarily valuable, but an idea is just an idea. Almost any one can think up an idea. The thing that counts is developing it into a practical product.

At the table, where food and stories are passed from one person to another and one generation to another, is where each of us learns who we are, where we come from, what we can be, to whom we belong, and to what we are called.

Twopence a week, and jam every other day.

Jews do not have to be Christians. Christianity is an offshoot of Judaism, but too utopian, too hopeful, too unrealistic a turn.

Books, like proverbs, receive their chief value from the stamp and esteem of ages through which they passed.

When they were done, the stones lay heaped upon the still form. The crowd dispersed like crows flying from empty bones. The elders picked up their robes and walked away. The mob was now silent. No one met the gaze of his neighbor. They drifted away, until only Ezra stood at one side, Saul on the other.

I went to a school run by Catholic nuns. They were really strict.

We bless the organized church structures and their meetings. But if there are 10,000 others that meet outside of these ecclesiastical structures, that's wonderful, too. The kingdom of God moves forward in lots and lots of ways.

It is evident that the Church is always abandoning more the old traditional structures of European life and, therefore, is changing its appearance and living new forms in itself. It's clear most of all that the de-Christianization of Europe is progressing, that the Christian element is always vanishing more from the fabric of society.

G. K. Chesterton famously quipped that "those who marry the spirit of the age will find themselves widows in the next.