“Tradition is a prison with majority opinion the modern jailer.”
Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 108
Source: The Summing Up (1938), p. 223
“Tradition is a prison with majority opinion the modern jailer.”
Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 108
The Voluntary Movie Rating System (2004)
Context: By summer of 1966, the national scene was marked by insurrection on the campus, riots in the streets, rise in women's liberation, protest of the young, doubts about the institution of marriage, abandonment of old guiding slogans, and the crumbling of social traditions. It would have been foolish to believe that movies, that most creative of art forms, could have remained unaffected by the change and torment in our society.
The result of all this was the emergence of a "new kind" of American movie — frank and open, and made by filmmakers subject to very few self-imposed restraints.
Here's a Health to Them That's Awa, st. 1
Posthumous Pieces (1799)
“Rationality is not an arbiter of traditions, it is itself a tradition or an aspect of a tradition.”
pg 27
Science in a Free Society (1978)
Context: Traditions are neither good nor bad, they simply are... Rationality is not an arbiter of traditions, it is itself a tradition or an aspect of a tradition.
“Respect for ourselves guides our morals; respect for others guides our manners”
"First We Take Manhattan"
I'm Your Man (1988)
We the People interview (1996)
Context: Friendship in the Greek tradition, in the Roman tradition, in the old tradition, was always viewed as the highest point which virtue can reach. Virtue, meaning here, "the habitual facility of doing the good thing," which is fostered by what the Greeks called politaea, political life, community life. I know it was a political life in which I wouldn't have liked to participate, with the slaves around and with the women excluded, but I still have to go to Plato or to Cicero. They conceived of friendship as a supreme flowering, of the interaction which happens in a good political society.
Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), The Social Problem, p. 87