Quotes about tradition
page 6

“the Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty enacted in by the Knesset in 1992, to anchor in a Basic Law the values of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state two strands – the Jewish heritage and the democratic tradition… and it is the task of the courts to interweave them into the synthesis indicated by the Basic Law”

Menachem Elon (1923–2013) Israeli High Court judge

see: Menachem Elon, English translation of Jewish Law : History, Sources, Principles / Jewish Publication Society, 1994

Law

“When they come together to make music, the Welsh sing their traditional songs, not in unison, as is done elsewhere, but in parts, in many modes and modulations. When a choir gathers to sing, which happens often in this country, you will hear as many different parts and voices as there are performers.”
In musico modulamine, non uniformiter, ut alibi, sed multipliciter, multisque modis et modulis, cantilenas emittunt. Adeo ut in turba canentium, sicut huic genti mos est, quot videas capita, tot audias carmina discriminaque vocum varia.

Gerald of Wales (1146) Medieval clergyman and historian

Book 1, chapter 13, p. 242.
Descriptio Cambriae (The Description of Wales) (1194)

Music, Singing, Parting, Country

“I have studied the art of the ancients and the art of the moderns, avoiding any preconceived system and without prejudice. I no longer wanted to imitate the one than to copy the other; nor, furthermore, was it my intention to attain the trivial goal of "art for art's sake". No! I simply wanted to draw forth, from a complete acquaintance with tradition, the reasoned and independent consciousness of my own individuality.”

Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) French painter

1840s - 1850s, Realist Manifesto', 1851/1855

Art, Study, Drawing

“It is an American tradition that a standing army is a standing menace to liberty; in Jefferson's presidency the army was reduced to 3,000 men. It is American tradition that we keep out of the affairs of other nations. It is American practice that we meddle with the affairs of everybody else from the West to the East Indies, from Russia to Japan; and to do it we have a standing army of 83,251 men.”

Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) American anarchist writer and feminist

Anarchism & American Traditions (1908)

Men

“Value stock returns are impossible to estimate using the traditional methods, because most of the excessive return arises from the slow improvement in valuations that occurs as doggy stocks become less doggy over time.”

William J. Bernstein (1948) economist

Source: The Four Pillars of Investing (2002), Chapter 2, Measuring The Beast, p. 68.

Time

“Tradition is an important help to history, but its statements should be carefully scrutinized before we rely on them.”

Joseph Addison (1672–1719) politician, writer and playwright

Attributed to "Addison" in A Dictionary of Thoughts : Being a Cyclopedia of Laconic Quotations from the Best Authors of the World, both Ancient and Modern (1908) edited by Tryon Edwards, p. 580, but this might be the later "Mr. Addison" who was credited with publishing Interesting Anecdotes, Memoirs, Allegories, Essays, and Poetical Fragments (1794).
Disputed

History, Help

“The most likely way to kill a tradition is to over-formalize it, which is to carry it on in the same way after everyone has ceased to defer to it. The way to revive it is to show that it has grown out of and is still related to our most cherished values. But this requires radical insight and the stripping away of many things which are mere accretions.”

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar

“The Importance of Cultural Freedom,” p. 29.
Life Without Prejudice (1965)

Way

““Talk you of tradition in middle of singularity.” Sister Seventh twisted her head around to look out the windows at the foggy evening drizzle beyond. “Perplexity maximizes. Not understand singularity is discontinuity with all tradition? Revolution is necessary; deconstruct the old, ring in the new. Before, I questioned your sapience. Now, your sanity questionable; sapience not. Only sapient organism could exhibit superlative irrationality!””

Charles Stross book Singularity Sky

Source: Singularity Sky (2003), Chapter 6, “Telegram from the Dead” (p. 144)

Understanding, Question, Sister

“Humanism does not exist in itself, just as man taken in himself and for himself does not exist. Only concrete man exists, man set in a particular age, living in a particular country, belonging to a particular social class, representing a particular tradition and particular personal ideals.”

Adam Schaff (1913–2006) Polish Marxist philosopher and theorist

Adam Schaff (1947), cited in: Susan Petrilli and Augusto Ponzio (2007) "Adam Schaff: from Semantics to Political Semiotics." 9th World Congress of IASS/AIS. 2007.

Age, Personality, Country

“In Norway, we have a community of people who prefer to use a version of Norwegian that looks very much like lutefisk: Dug up remains from the garbage heap of history and dressed up to look like a tradition.”

Erik Naggum (1965–2009) Norwegian computer programmer

On nynorsk, from Re: Irish road-signs are now metric http://groups.google.com/group/misc.metric-system/msg/aaa11856a516419a (Usenet article). Usenet articles, Miscellaneous

People, History, Communication

“Is this an argument for abolition? Of course it is. But not for an abolition by fiat: for yet another political change that would come as a surprise to the passively governed. It is an invitation to think - are you serious when you say that you cannot imagine life without it? Do you prefer invented tradition, sanitised history, prettified literature, state-sponsored superstition and media-dominated pulses of cheering and jeering?”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

1990s, The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain's Favourite Fetish

Life, Imagination, History, Literature

“The urge to break with a tradition is only appropriate when you're dealing with an outdated, troublesome tradition: I never really thought about that because I take the old-fashioned approach of equating tradition with value (which may be a failing). But whatever the case, positive tradition can also provoke opposition if it's too powerful, too overwhelming, too demanding. That would basically be about the human side of wanting to hold your own.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

Quote of Richter from an interview with Jeanne Anne Nugent, 2006; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: 'on Other subjects' https://www.gerhard-richter.com/en/quotes/other-aspects-6 after 2000

Fashion

“For the sake of national integration in India, it is imperative to set the record straight, to reverse this process of absolutizing any minor difference in identity into a separatist claim to a nation-state. In the specific case of the Sikhs, the obvious fact should be made clear, that Sikh identity is integrated in a hierarchy of differentiation within Hinduism : it is a Bhakti sect within the broad Vaishnava tradition within Sanatana Dharma.”

Koenraad Elst (1959) orientalist, writer

1990s, Ayodhya and After: Issues Before Hindu Society (1991)

“Nietzsche seems sometimes to replace the “transcendence” which stands at the center of traditional accounts—the existence of a transcendent God, or, failing that, a transcendental viewpoint—with that of a continually transcending activity. … There is no single, final perspective, but given any one perspective, we can always go beyond it.”

Raymond Geuss (1946) British philosopher

Source: Outside Ethics (2005), pp. 8-9.

God

“I think my problem is that I do have the fire in my belly. I am so adamantly supportive of the good traditional things about America and our free enterprise system, and I want to make sure that America is put back on the right track, and we only do that by defeating Obama in 2012. I have that fire in my belly. It’s a matter for me a couple of practical, pragmatic decisions that have to be made. One is, with a large family, understanding the huge amount of scrutiny and the sacrifices that have to be made on my children's part, in order to see their mama run for president! But yeah, the fire in the belly, it's there! That's kind of my problem! It's such a roaring fire in my belly to preserve and restore all that’s good about America, that I struggle with that every single day.”

Sarah Palin (1964) American politician

On the Record with Greta van Susteren
Television
Fox News
2011-05-19
2011

Children, Family, Understanding, Support

“It is not, however, the unfamiliarity or strangeness of a work or of a composer's manner that is a bar to understanding, but rather the disappearance of the familiar, the ongoing disappointment of the expectations and hopes fostered by the musical tradition in which we have grown up.”

Charles Rosen (1927–2012) American pianist and writer on music

Source: The Frontiers of Meaning: Three Informal Lectures on Music (1994), Ch. 1 : The Frontiers of Nonsense

Hope, Music, Disappointment, Understanding

“Yet even here all these peoples have remained rooted in their sacred homelands for centuries. Though oppressed and colonized by outsiders, they have never been expelled en masse, and so the theme of restoration to the homeland has played little part in the conceptions of these peoples. There are, however, two peoples, apart from the Jews, for whom restoration of the homeland and commonwealth have been central: the Greeks and the Armenians, and together with the Jews, they constitute the archetypal Diaspora peoples, or what John Armstrong has called ‘mobilized diasporas° Unlike diasporas composed of recent mi migrant workers—Indians, Chinese and others in Southeast Asia, East Africa and the Caribbean— mobilized diasporas are of considerable antiquity, are generally polyglot and multi-skilled trading communities and have ancient, portable religious traditions. Greeks, Jews, and Armenians claimed an ancient homeland and kingdom, looked back nostalgically to a golden age or ages of great kings, saints, sages and poets, yearned to return to ancient capitals with sacred sites and buildings, took with them wherever they went their ancient scriptures, sacred scripts and separate liturgies, founded in every city congregations with churches, clergy and religious schools, traded across the Middle East and Europe using the networks of enclaves of their co-religionists to compete with other ethnic trading networks, and used their wealth, education and economic skills to offset their political powerlessness)”

Anthony D. Smith (1939–2016) British academic

Source: Myths and Memories of the Nation (1999), Chapter: Greeks, Armenians and Jews.

People, Age, Education, School

“There's a reason for poetry… Poetry is a very nonlinear use of language, where the meaning is more than just the sum of the parts. And science requires that it be nothing more than the sum of the parts. And just the fact that there's stuff to explain out there that's more than the sum of the parts means that the traditional approach, just characterizing the parts and the relations, is not going to be adequate for capturing the essence of many systems that you would like to be able to do. That's not to say that there isn't a way to do it in a more scientific way than poetry, but I just like the feeling that culturally there's going to be more of something like poetry in the future of science.”

Christopher Langton (1949) American computer scientist

Christopher Langton, as quoted by John Horgan, The End of Science (1996) p. 201.

Way, Feeling, Science, Future

“In our libertarian society, where individual choice is all, ‘liberal’ and ‘progressive’ have come to mean something very different. Liberals took for granted that freedom depended upon self-discipline. Libertarians decided that all such restraint was repressive. The individual had to be free from all attachments to family, culture, nation, institutions and traditions that might fetter freedom of choice. Since every individual was equally entitled to such free choices, the distinctions that were the basis of morality became eroded.”

Melanie Phillips (1951) British journalist

http://www.melaniephillips.com/articles/archives/2000_01.html

Family, Freedom, Dependency

“In the tradition of Abudhar, who is my mentor, whose thought, whose understanding of Islam and Shi'ism, and whose ideals, wants, and rage I emulate, I begin my talk with the name of the God of the oppressed (mustad'afan). My topic is very specific.”

Ali Shariati (1933–1977) Iranian academic and activist

Source: Where Shall We Begin, 1997-2013, p. 1 Lead sentence.

God, Understanding, Rage

“The artist's tool or the traditional artist's brush and maybe even oil paint are all disappearing very quickly. We use mostly commercial paint, and we generally tend toward lager brushes. In a way, Abstract Expressionism started this all. De Kooning used house painter's brushes and house painters' techniques.”

Frank Stella (1936) American artist

Source: Quotes, 1960 - 1970, Questions to Stella and Judd' - September 1966, p. 120

Way, Painting, Housing

“The second thing you need to know is the importance of Mohammed the prophet. His behaviour is an example to all Muslims and cannot be criticized. Now, if Mohammed had been a man of peace, let us say like Ghandi and Mother Theresa wrapped in one, there would be no problem. But Mohammed was a warlord, a mass murderer, a pedophile, and had several marriages – at the same time. Islamic tradition tells us how he fought in battles, how he had his enemies murdered and even had prisoners of war executed. Mohammed himself slaughtered the Jewish tribe of Banu Qurayza.”

Geert Wilders (1963) Dutch politician

2000s, Speech at the Four Seasons, New York (25 September 2008)

Marriage, War, Peace, Problem

“Feminism, in all fields, has yet to produce a single scholar of the intellectual rank of scores of these learned men [e. g., Bruno Snell, Albin Lesky, Denys Page] in the German and British academic tradition.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders : Academe in the Hour of the Wolf, p. 204

Men, Learning

“If in the nineteenth century most scholars identified the Ghaggar-Hakra's course with the Vedic Sarasvati, it is basically for three reasons. The Rig-Veda, the oldest of the four Vedas, mentions various rivers but praises the Sarasvati above all others: it was a "mighty river" flowing "from the mountain to the sea", and one hymn listed it between the Yamuna and the Sutlej - precisely the location of the Ghaggar-Hakra. Secondly, the local traditions regarding the "lost river" of the Indian desert matched those in the post-Vedic literature (including the Mahabharata), which recorded the gradual disappearance of the Sarasvati. Thirdly, scholars noticed a minor tributary of the Ghaggar called "Sarsuti", an obvious corruption of "Sarasvati": it rises in the Sirmur hills that are part of the Shivaliks and was marked on British maps as early as in 1788. Putting these three lines of evidence together, they concluded that the lost Sarasvati could only have flowed in the Ghaggar's bed.”

Michel Danino (1956) Indian writer

Supporting the claim that Ghaggar-Hakra is the Sarasvati river, as quoted in " Sarasvati: Tracing the death of a river http://www.dnaindia.com/blogs/post-sarasvati-tracing-the-death-of-a-river-1581502" DNA India (12 June 2010)

Mountain, Literature, Parting, Sea

“I’ve been a vegetarian for 14 years, just about my entire racing career. The past 3 years I’ve been completely vegan, which means I don’t use any animal products whatsoever. … Hard training is, at its essence, a process of making yourself almost sick with work, recovering from it, and adapting to it. … Adequate protein intake from plant sources should not be a concern if you’re consuming the right foods. Again, the primary mistake to avoid is to define your vegetarianism by what you don’t eat, rather than what you do. If you use vegetarianism as an opportunity to explore new dietary options, particularly from cultures that have a tradition of vegetarianism, you should find that you eat a wider, rather than narrower, variety of foods.”

Adam Myerson (1972) American professional bicycle racer

"The Vegetarian Athlete, Part I" https://web.archive.org/web/20041225183944/http://www.cycle-smart.com/Articles/find.php?search=37, on his website Cycle-Smart (2004).

Food, Past, Animals, Training

“Multi-unit business enterprise replaced small traditional enterprise when administrative coordination permitted greater productivity, lower costs, and higher profits than coordination by market mechanisms.”

Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. (1918–2007) American historian

Source: The Visible Hand (1977), p. 6.

Business

“Man's carnivorous nature is not taken for granted, or praised in the fundamental teachings of Judaism. The rabbis of the 111:32). The implication is clear, that Judaism was engaged in weaning men from such practices. Judaism as a religion offers the option of eating animal flesh, and most Jews do, but in our own country there has been a movement towards vegetarianism among very pious Jews. A whole galaxy of central rabbinic and spiritual teachers including several past and present Chief Rabbis of the Holy Land, have been affirming vegetarianism as the ultimate meaning of Jewish moral teaching. They have been proclaiming the autonomy of all living creatures as the value which our religious tradition must now teach to all of its believers.”

Arthur Hertzberg (1921–2006) American rabbi and historian

“The Jewish Declaration on Nature,” from “ The Assisi Declarations http://www.arcworld.org/downloads/THE%20ASSISI%20DECLARATIONS.pdf” in for WWF's 25th anniversary (29 September 1986).

Men, Religion, Nature, Teachers

“The sixteenth century transformed Middle English into modern English. Grammar was up for grabs. People made up vocabulary and syntax as they went along. Not until the eighteenth century would rules of English usage appear. Shakespearean language is a bizarre super-tongue, alien and plastic, twisting, turning, and forever escaping. It is untranslatable, since it knocks Anglo-Saxon root words against Norman and Greco-Roman importations sweetly or harshly, kicking us up and down rhetorical levels with witty abruptness. No one in real life ever spoke like Shakespeare’s characters. His language does not “make sense,” especially in the greatest plays. Anywhere from a third to a half of every Shakespearean play, I conservatively estimate, will always remain under an interpretive cloud. Unfortunately, this fact is obscured by the encrustations of footnotes in modern texts, which imply to the poor cowed student that if only he knew what the savants do, all would be as clear as day. Every time I open Hamlet, I am stunned by its hostile virtuosity, its elusiveness and impenetrability. Shakespeare uses language to darken. He suspends the traditional compass points of rhetoric, still quite firm in Marlowe, normally regarded as Shakespeare’s main influence. Shakespeare’s words have “aura.””

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

This he got from Spenser, not Marlowe.
Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 195

Life, Hostility, People, Sense

“There is always the danger that the use of traditional grammatical terms with reference to a wide variety of languages may be taken to imply a secret belief in universal grammar. Every analysis of a particular ‘language’ must of necessity determine the values of the ad hoc categories to which traditional names are given. What is here being sketched is a general linguistic theory applicable to particular linguistic descriptions, not a theory of universals for general linguistic description.”

John Rupert Firth (1890–1960) English linguist

Source: "A synopsis of linguistic theory 1930-1955." 1957, p. 21; as cited in: Olivares, Beatriz Enriqueta Quiroz. The interpersonal and experiential grammar of Chilean Spanish: Towards a principled Systemic-Functional description based on axial argumentation. Diss. University of Sydney, 2013.

Secret, Universe

“A prominent manufacturer once said that although he could see some use for an organization chart for his factory, he had refused to chart the organization above the level of factory superintendent. His argument was that charts tend to make people overly conscious of being superiors or inferiors, tend to destroy team feeling, and give persons occupying a box on the chart too great a feeling of "ownership"? Another top executive once said that if an organization is left uncharted, it can be changed more easily and that the absence of a chart also encourages a competitive drive for higher executive positions on the part of the uncharted middle-management group.
These reasons for not charting organization structures are clearly unsound. Subordinate - superior relationships exist not because of charting but because of essential reporting relationships. As for a chart's creating a too comfortable feeling and causing a lack of drive on the part of those who have "arrived", these are matters of top leadership - of reorganizing whenever the enterprise environment demands, of developing a tradition of change, and of making subordinate managers continue to meet adequate and well-understood standards of performance.”

Harold Koontz (1909–1984)

Source: Principles of management, 1968, p. 379; About the advantages of organizational charts

People, Feeling, Change, Parting

“To this end I suggest we need to look to an idea deeply rooted in Christian life and thought. The idea of the Common Good. The Common Good is concerned with personal and mutual flourishing in terms of our talents and vocations. It is about treating people as they really are: as human beings who belong to families, localities and communities. To shared traditions, interests and faiths. Not as abstracted, rootless, atomised individuals that dominates neo-classical or neoliberal thinking -the thinking that dominates our life.”

Jon Cruddas (1962) British politician

The Common Good in an Age of Austerity Lecture, 9 July 2014 http://joncruddas.org.uk/sites/joncruddas.org.uk/files/ebor%20a.pdf

Life, People, Family, Faith

“We can best serve the cause of Canadian unity and understanding by living first in and through and then beyond our own immediate traditions.”

Vincent Massey (1887–1967) Governor General of Canada

Address to the Canadian Club of Ottawa, December 18, 1952
Speaking Of Canada - (1959)

Understanding

“Tradition usually rests upon something which men did know; history is often the manufacture of the mere liar.”

Jefferson Davis (1808–1889) President of the Confederate States of America

Scotland & The Scottish People https://books.google.com/books?id=NINHAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=scotland+%26+the+scottish+people&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CBwQ6AEwAGoVChMIuKPUmZGkyAIVQ5qACh0kewz7#v=onepage&q=scotland%20%26%20the%20scottish%20people&f=false

Men, History

“The principle of inorganic equality was for them crucial. Men of the stamp of Jahn and Arndt had no notion that it was Equality that had first sounded the cry of "Vive la nation" in the September massacres of 1792.
They forgot, too, one basic fact. The Romanticism of their Volkslieder sang only the heroism of the common soldier, but the inner worth of these armies (at first amateurs in the calling of arms), their spirit, their discipline, and their training, depended upon the quality of the officer‑ corps, whose adequacy was due entirely to eighteenth-century traditions. With the Jacobins also a body of soldiers was morally worth precisely as much as its officer, who had trained it by his example. Napoleon confessed at St. Helena that he would not have been beaten had he had for his superb fighting material a corps of officers like the Austrian, a corps in which chivalrous traditions of loyalty, honour, and silent self-discipline still survived. Once the command wavers in its intentions and its attitude—or itself abdicates, as in 1918—the bravest regiment becomes on the spot a cowardly and helpless herd. …
All young sects are at bottom hostile to State and property, class and rank, and are attracted to universal equality.”

Oswald Spengler (1880–1936) German historian and philosopher

The Hour of Decision (1933)

Men, Hostility, Universe, Fight

“百花齐放，百家争鸣 (Simplified Chinese), 百花齊放，百家爭鳴 (Traditional Chinese), bǎihuāqífàng, bǎijiāzhēngmíng”

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China

Pinyin
"Let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend" is the policy for promoting progress in the arts and the sciences and a flourishing socialist culture in our land.
Slogan used at the start of the Hundred Flowers Campaign of open criticism of the communist government that began in late 1956 and ended in July 1957.

“Tradition is not, as post-modernists maintain, a library or museum the artist plunders. It is the endless conversation between the living and the dead. Young artists enter into this conversation passionately — not merely intellectually, though study and analysis play a part. They live and breathe it. Tradition is not a public building. It is a love affair.”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

"Paradigms Lost," interview with Gloria Brame, ELF: Eclectic Literary Forum (Spring 1995)
Interviews

Love, Study, Passion, Parting

“In America, the traditional routes to black identity have hardly been normal. Suicide (disappearance by imitation, or willed extinction), violence (hysterical religiosity, crime, armed revolt), and exemplary moral courage; none of these is normal.”

June Jordan (1936–2002) Poet, essayist, playwright, feminist and bisexual activist

Source: Black Studies: Bringing Back The Person (1969), p. 48

Courage, Suicide

“I believe that Fiji is at the cross roads. We should all be proud of our traditions and our rich multi-cultural heritage.”

Koila Nailatikau (1953) Fijian politician

On her boycott of the "Fiji Week" reconciliation ceremonies, Senate Speech, 28 October 2004 (excerpts) http://www.parliament.gov.fj/hansard/viewhansard.aspx?hansardID271&viewtypefull

“Maybe the years I spent playing the piano in taverns in Chicago and elsewhere led me to believe that the people who did that mundane work were as important to an understanding of art as the better-known players who produced the recognized classics of jazz. Growing up … may have led me to think that the craftsman who help make art works areas important as the people who conceive them… Learning the "Chicago tradition" of sociology from Everett C. Hughes and Herbert Blumer surely led to a skepticism about conventional definitions of the objects of sociological study.”

Howard S. Becker (1928) American sociologist

Source: Art Worlds (1982), p. ix.

People, Art, Understanding, Thinking

“The white people who came here lived at a very much higher standard than the indigenous peoples, and with a very rich tradition which they brought with them from Europe.”

P. W. Botha (1916–2006) South African prime minister

As cited in Dictionary of South African Quotations, Jennifer Crwys-Williams, Penguin Books 1994, p. 441

People

“All doctrines relating to the creation of the world, the government of man by superior beings, and his destiny after death, are conjectures which have been given out as facts, handed down with many adornments by tradition, and accepted by posterity as "revealed religion". They are theories more or less rational which uncivilised men have devised in order to explain the facts of life, and which civilised men believe that they believe.”

William Winwood Reade (1838–1875) British historian

Source: The Martyrdom of Man (1872), Chapter II, "Religion", p. 138.

Life, Death, Men, World

“You can still fulfil your traditional obligations but the contradiction in the system between the communal approach and the free market approach needs to be addressed.”

Mahendra Chaudhry (1942) Fijian politician

Interview with Fiji Live, 22 August 2005

Communication

“[W]hat al Qaeda is fighting for is a traditional understanding of the family. This is not a minor part of their program: it is at its heart. The traditional family is built around some clearly defined principles. First, the home is the domain of the woman and life outside the house is the purview of the man. Second, sexuality is something confined to the family and the home, and extramarital, extrafamilial sexuality is unacceptable. Women who move outside the home invite extramarital sexuality just by being there. Third, women have as their primary tasks reproduction and nurturing of the next generation. Therefore, intense controls on women are necessary to maintain the integrity of the family and of society. In an interesting way it is all about women, and bin Laden's letter [to the U. S. ] drives this home. What he hates about America is that it promotes a completely different view of women and the family.”

George Friedman (1949) American businessman and political scientist

Source: The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (2009), p. 50

Life, Women, Hate, Family

“The fundamentalist position on biblical interpretation, with its emphasis on the explicit, complete, final, and authoritarian nature of Scripture, is a very late, minority view quite out of step with the Western tradition.”

Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) American historian

Source: The Evolution of Civilizations (1961) (Second Edition 1979), Chapter 10, Western Civilization, p. 342

Nature

“As far as fanatical Muslims are concerned, Yazidis must be classified among the heathen because they do not belong to any of the three Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Under Islamic rules, Jews and Christians are regarded as “people of the book” and thus could live among Muslims provided they pay a protection fee known as “dhimma.” Even if they wanted to, Yazidis cannot make use of that provision because they regard themselves as followers of Zoroaster, a prophet of ancient Iranian peoples who preached around 700 BC… A peaceful people opposed to violence and bloodshed, Yazidis believe that no cause is worth killing people for, something that scandalizes fanatical Muslims who regard the spread of “The Only True Faith” by sword as a duty and the man who does it as the “Ghazi” (Holy Warrior) who is assured a place in paradise. The Yazidis tradition of equality between men and women, including the rejection of polygamy, also scandalizes their fanatical Muslim neighbors.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

"Why some Muslims want to kill the Yazidis by genocide" http://nypost.com/2014/08/17/why-some-muslims-want-to-destroy-the-yazidis-by-genocide/, New York Post (August 17, 2014). New York Post

Women, Men, People, Books

“Catholicity, the focus of this study, has long been recognized as an essential attribute of the Church of Christ and has been of particular concern to those churches which designate themselves as 'Catholic'. It is not possible to analyse catholicity without speaking of other traditional attributes of the Church: unity, holiness, and apostolicity. In the context of planetization, in which the cultures of diverse peoples are interacting and interpenetrating, catholicity takes on new and challenging aspects, decisive for the future of Christianity. Catholicity has ramifications in many different areas of ecclesiology. The present work, although brief, necessarily touches on many problems of historical and contemporary theology. But it does not pretend to be, even in outline, a complete ecclesiology.”

Avery Dulles (1918–2008) Catholic cardinal

Preface
The Catholicity of the Church

People, Problem, Decision, Study

“Artificial Life [AL] is the study of man-made systems that exhibit behaviors characteristic of natural living systems. It complements the traditional biological sciences concerned with the analysis of living organisms by attempting to synthesize life-like behaviors within computers and other artificial media. By extending the empirical foundation upon which biology is based beyond the carbon-chain life that has evolved on Earth, Artificial Life can contribute to theoretical biology by locating life-as-we-know-it within the larger picture of life-as-it-could-be.”

Christopher Langton (1949) American computer scientist

Source: Artificial Life (1989), p.1

Life, Behavior, Nature, Study

“Today's terrorism is not the product of a traditional history of anarchism, nihilism, or fanaticism. It is instead the contemporary partner of globalization.”

Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) French sociologist and philosopher

The Spirit of Terrorism (2003) "The Violence of the Global"
New millennium

History

“In the classical conservative and libertarian traditions values are private things. They must be left to individuals and to civil society to practice and police. Party and state operatives have police powers with which to back their 'values.' Therefore, never-ever are they to preach or police The People's values.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

"Trump nation tired of racial sadomasochism," http://www.wnd.com/2016/03/trump-nation-tired-of-racial-sadomasochism/ WorldNetDaily.com, March 3, 2016. 2010s, 2016

People

“The men of faith might claim for their positions ancient tradition, practical usefulness, and spiritual desirability, but one query could prick all such bubbles: Is it scientific? That question has searched religion for contraband goods, stripped it of old superstitions, forced it to change its categories of thought and methods of work, and in general has so cowed and scared religion that many modern-minded believers… instinctively throw up their hands at the mere whisper of it… When a prominent scientist comes out strongly for religion, all the churches thank Heaven and take courage, as though it were the highest possible compliment to God to have Eddington believe in Him. Science has become the arbiter of this generation's thought, until to call even a prophet and a seer "scientific" is to cap the climax of praise.”

Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878–1969) American pastor

As I See Religion (1932)

Men, God, Faith, Religion

“Clinging uncritically to traditional ideas and beliefs often serves to obscure or deny real facts of our life history.”

Alice Miller (1923–2010) Swiss psychologist

The Drama of the Gifted Child (Das Drama des begabten Kindes, 1979)

Life, History, Idea

“No matter what the legislature may say, a man has the right to make his speech, print his handbill, compose his newspaper, and deliver his sermon without asking anyone's permission. The contrary suggestion is abhorrent to our traditions.”

William O. Douglas (1898–1980) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Dissenting, Poulos v. New Hampshire, 345 U.S. 395 (1953)
Judicial opinions

“Though Latin long held sway in Court and bureaucratic circles, the cultural cement of the empire’s core populations was Greek and its education was in the Greek classics and tongue. Imperial tradition, Christian Orthodoxy and Greek culture became even more the bases of Byzantium and her Hellenic community, after she had lost most of her western and Asiatic possessions in the seventh century — to Visigoths and then Arabs m Spain and North Africa, to the Lombards in much of Italy, to the Slavs in the Balkans and to Muslim armies in Egypt and the Near East. Political circumstances, and the resilience of Greek culture and Greek education, made her predominantly Greek in speech and character. After the sack of Constantinople in 1204 and the establishment of a Latin empire under Venetian auspices, the rivalry of the Greek empires based on Nicaea, Epirus and Trebizond to realize the patriotic Hellenic dream of recapturing the former capital further stimulated Greek ethnic sentiment against Latin usurpation. W1cn in the face of Turkith threats, the fifteenth-century Byzantine emperor, Michael Palaeologus, tried to place the Orthodox Church under the Papacy and hence Western protection; an inflamed Greek sentiment vigorously opposed his policy. The city’s populace in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, their Hellenic sentiments fanned by monks, priests and the Orthodox party against the Latin policies of the government, actually preferred the Turkish turban to the Latin mitre and attacked the urban wealthy classes. But the Turkish conquest and the demise of Byzantium did not spell the end of the Orthodox Greek community and its ethnic sentiment. tinder its Church and Patriarch, and organized as a recognized milliet of the Ottoman empire, the Greek community flourished in exile, the upper classes of its Diaspora assuming privileged economic and bureaucratic positions in the empire. So Byzantine bureaucratic incorporation had paradoxical effects: as in Egypt, it helped to sunder the mass of the Greek community from the state and its Court and bureaucratic imperial myths and culture in favour of a more demotic Greek Orthodoxy; but, unlike Egypt, the demise of the state served to strengthen that Orthodoxy and reattach to it the old dynastic Messianic symbolism of a restored Byzantine empire in opposition to Turkish oppression.”

Anthony D. Smith (1939–2016) British academic

The Ethnic Origins of Nations (1987)

Education, Dreams, Communication, Help

“He is not bound so tightly by tradition that he will refuse a good idea simply for it being new, and not so wild that he would take a bad idea simply because it is new.”

Laura Anne Gilman book Flesh and Fire

Source: Flesh and Fire (2009), p. 230

Idea

“Discard all traditional standards. Leave them to the hypocrites. Only what liberates you from desire and fear and wrong ideas is good. As long as you worry about sin and virtue you will have no peace. (…)”

Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897–1981) Indian guru

Liberation
Source: "I am That." P.71

Fear, Peace, Idea

“The standard model of ethical theory may seem like merely a necessary consequence of applying to normative ethics the high standards of clarity and rigor prized by all of us who like to think of ourselves as philosophers in the analytic tradition. This way of doing ethics obviously parallels the way analytical philosophers treat many other subjects – by formulating generalizations about this or that and testing them against intuitive counterexamples. But I think the Sidgwickian method of intuitional ethics, or the Rawlsian method of reflective equilibrium, is not the only way to think clearly about ethical theory.”

Allen W. Wood (1942) academic

Kantian Ethics (2008)

Way, Thinking

“The United States has never had the tradition of a military class. The President of the United States is the Commander in Chief of the Armed Services, and the officers and enlisted men of the Army, Navy, and Air Force are drawn from all classes of American life and must be trained from scratch.”

Ernest King (1878–1956) United States Navy admiral, Chief of Naval Operations

Source: Introduction, p. viii note: 1950s, Fleet Admiral King: A Naval Record (1952)

Life, Men, Training

“For all the advances of modern societies, traditional tribal communities may have better served the essential needs of people for emotional support, nutrition, and exercise than does contemporary society. We don’t need to return to the ways of our ancestors, but we do need to learn from them.”

David Korten (1937) writer, sustainability advocate

People, Way, Exercises, Communication

“What was crucial to the partnership, it should be noted, is that Flavor Flav was a clown — in the tradition of the best black comics — yet he was a clown with consciousness, empowered with knowledge of self, an entirely different persona from the "Stepin Fetchit" and "Sambo" stereotypes of subservient and uncouth black Americans. Flavor Flav was and is a fool, but a fool on a mission. On the cover of Nation of Millions, he wears a gigantic clock as a medallion — a preposterous getup — yet it is designed to illustrate, through a comic medium, that time is indeed running out.”

Flavor Flav (1959) American rapper

Rickey Vincent, Funk: The Music, the People, and the Rhythm of the One (1996), p. 309.
About

Fools, Knowledge, Time, Partnership

“All my life I have tried to do too many different things. I wonder if this is not a perpetual dilemma for women. A man enters on a job or profession, needs to stick to it to earn his living, and is unlikely to have to change it on marriage. For a woman marriage presents not only practical problems, but she finds herself emotionally pulled all ways, and tends by tradition and impulse to put the needs of others before her own. What is more, opening her eyes on the world, she feels intensely responsible for setting it to rights.”

Dora Russell (1894–1986) author, feminist, socialist campaigner

Source: The Tamarisk Tree (1975), Ch. IX

Life, Women, Marriage, World

“It′s always seemed odd to me that people don′t paint with both hands. I mean, if I′m technically so shackled that I can′t paint with my hair, stomach or bottom, what about my other hand? You′ve got to live in painting. All-round painting… Indefinable space-at least indefinable in traditional terms-that′s what I require of my paintings. There must be absolutely no central focus… There can be no progress until that damned centre has been eliminated… My paintings are sublimated stamping, screaming and hissing-I try to translate a process experienced physically into a physically visible one.”

Günter Brus (1938) Austrian artist

Source: Nervous Stillness on the Horizon (2006), P. 106 (1960)

People, Painting

“The movement nowadays called fundamentalism is not the only Islamic tradition. There are others, more tolerant, more open, that helped to inspire the great achievements of Islamic civilization in the past, and we may hope that these other traditions will in time prevail. But before this issue is decided there will be a hard struggle, in which we of the West can do little or nothing. Even the attempt might do harm, for these are issues that Muslims must decide among themselves. And in the meantime we must take great care on all sides to avoid the danger of a new era of religious wars, arising from the exacerbation of differences and the revival of ancient prejudices.
To this end we must strive to achieve a better appreciation of other religious and political cultures, through the study of their history, their literature, and their achievements. At the same time, we may hope that they will try to achieve a better understanding of ours, and especially that they will understand and respect, even if they do not choose to adopt for themselves, our Western perception of the proper relationship between religion and politics.”

Bernard Lewis (1916–2018) British-American historian

Books, The Roots of Muslim Rage (1990)

War, Religion, Hope, History

“Practically all traditional distinctions, whether economic, moral, social, or aesthetic, are today under assault as founded on a prejudice.”

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar

“Life without prejudice,” p. 4.
Life Without Prejudice (1965)

“I believe it is a mistake for Marxists to lose sight of the value of the Black feminist tradition--including the concept of intersectionality, both in its contribution to combatting the oppression of women of color, working-class women and the ways in which it can help to advance Marxist theory and practice.”

Sharon Smith (writer) (1956) American historian

A Marxist Case For Intersectionality (2017)

Women, Color, Way, Help

“Against this view, it is still possible to identify some cultural continuities. Kitromilides himself alludes to some of them, when he mentions “inherited forms of cultural expression, such as those associated with the Orthodox liturgical cycle and the images of emperors, the commemoration of Christian kings, the evocation of the Orthodox kingdom and its earthly seat, Constantinople, which is so powerfully communicated in texts such as the Akathist Hymn, sung every year during Lent and forming such an intimate component of Orthodox worship...“ (Kitromilides 1998, 31). There are other lines of Greek continuity. Despite the adoption of a new religion, Christianity, certain traditions, such as a dedication to competitive values, have remained fairly constant, as have the basic forms of the Greek language and the contours of the Greek homeland (though its centre of gravity was subject to change). And John Armstrong has pointed to the “precocious nationalism” that took hold of the Greek population of the Byzantine Empire under the last Palaeologan emperors and that was directed as much against the Catholic Latins as against the Muslim Turks—an expression of medieval Greek national sentiment as well as a harbinger of later Greek nationalism. But again, we may ask: was this Byzantine sentiment a case of purely confessional loyalty or of ethnoreligious nationalism?”

Anthony D. Smith (1939–2016) British academic

See Armstrong 1982, I74—8I cf. Baynes and Moss 1969, 119—27, and Carras 1983.
Source: The Nation in History (2000), p. 42-43.

Religion, Communication, Change, Loyalty

“It's New Mexico-style. But, it's not -- I don't want to call it "traditional". We can do traditional songs, but you got to be "modern" in what you do.”

Al Hurricane (1936–2017) American singer-songwriter

"Local Legends" on the CBS Early Show (December 26, 2011)

“Being an artist now means to question the nature of art. If one is questioning the nature of painting, one cannot be questioning the nature of art. If an artist accepts painting (or sculpture) he is accepting the tradition that goes with it. That’s because the word art is general and the word painting is specific. Painting is a kind of art. If you make paintings you are already accepting (not questioning) the nature of art. One is then accepting the nature of art to be the European tradition of a painting-sculpture dichotomy.”

Joseph Kosuth (1945) American conceptual artist

Joseph Kosuth in: Arthur R. Rose, “Four Interviews,” Arts Magazine (February, 1969).

Art, Question, Nature, Painting

“Today the poor are less often dismissed, I hope, from our consciences by being branded as inferior or incompetent. We also know that no matter how dynamically the economy develops and expands, it does not eliminate all poverty.
The problem indicates that our emphasis must be twofold. We must create full employment or we must create incomes. People must be made consumers by one method or the other. Once they are placed in this position we need to be concerned that the potential of the individual is not wasted. New forms of work that enhance the social good will have to be devised for those for whom traditional jobs are not available.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (1967)

People, Hope, Problem

“Perhaps the most dangerous element that was picked out of the Muslim tradition and changed and transformed in the hands of these young men who perpetrated Sept. 11 is this idea of committing suicide. They call it martyrdom, of course. Suicide is firmly rejected in Islam as an act of worship. In the tradition, generally, to die in battle for a larger purpose -- that is, for the sake of the community at large -- is a noble thing to do. Self-sacrifice yourself as you defend the community -- that is a traditional thing, and that has a traditional meaning of "jihad." But what is non-traditional, what is new is this idea that jihad is almost like an act of private worship. You become closer to God by blowing yourself up in such a way. You, privately, irrespective of what effect it has on everyone else…. For these young men, that is the new idea of jihad. This idea of jihad allows you to lose all the old distinctions between combatants and non-combatants, between just and unjust wars, between the rules of engagement of different types. All of that is gone, because now the act of martyrdom is an act of worship… in and of itself. It's like going on the pilgrimage. It's like paying your alms, which every Muslim has to do. It's like praying in the direction of Mecca, and so on and so forth. It is an individual act of worship. That's terrifying, and that's new. That's an entirely new idea, which these young men have taken out, developed.”

Kanan Makiya (1949) American orientalist

"Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero" http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/faith/interviews/makiya.html, PBS Frontline (2002)

Men, God, War, Way

“It is most important that we should rid art of all that it has contained of ‘recognizable material’ to date, all familiar subject matter, all traditional ideas, all popular symbols must be banished forthwith. More important still, we must hold enormous faith in ourselves; it is essential that the revelation we receive, the conception of an image which embraces a certain thing, which has no sense in itself, which has no subject, which means ‘absolutely nothing’ from the logical point of view.... should speak so strongly in us, evoke such agony or joy, that we feel compelled to paint.”

Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978) Italian artist

as quoted in Letters of the great artists – from Ghiberti to Gainsborough, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p . 232
1908 - 1920, On Mystery and Creation, Paris 1913

Faith, Art, Feeling, Idea

“Nationalism is fraught with dangers, of course, but so is the blind refusal to recognize that attachment to one’s own culture, traditions, and history is a creative, normal, and healthy part of human experience.”

Theodore Dalrymple (1949) English doctor and writer

How PC Boosts Le Pen http://www.city-journal.org/html/eon_4_25_02td.html (April 25, 2002). City Journal (1998 - 2008)

History, Parting

“That is the central idea of our current tradition. It is the idealization of the mass and the negation of the individual; its panacea, its method of realization, is political direction; its goal, as always, is the undefined Good Society… The aim of pedagogy today is not to prepare the individual for his own enjoyment of life, but to enable him to better serve the mass machine; the psychologist makes adjustment to mass-thought the measure of healthy thinking and living; jurisprudence puts social responsibility ahead of individual responsibility; the concern of the scientist in the discovery of principles is secondary to his preoccupation with mass production; the economist studies institutions, not people; and philosophy rejects speculation as to the nature of man or the purpose of life as effort that might better be put to the practical problems of society. Ours is the culture of ‘the all,’ rather than ‘the one.”

Frank Chodorov (1887–1966) American libertarian thinker

Source: One is A Crowd: Reflections of An Individualist (1952), pp. 36-37

Life, People, Idea, Nature

“Perhaps the House will allow me to add this: that I am afraid we must brace ourselves to confront one of those terrible events in the order of Providence which baffle foresight, which appall the imagination and make us realise the inadequacy of words to do justice to what we feel. We cannot say more at this moment than to give a necessarily imperfect impression of our sense of admiration that the best traditions of the sea seem to have been observed and that willing sacrifices were offered to give the first chance for safety to those who were least able to help themselves, and of the heartfelt sympathy of the whole nation to those who find themselves suddenly bereaved of their nearest and dearest.”

H. H. Asquith (1852–1928) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Address to the House of Commons on the sinking of the RMS Titanic; see [Asquith Voices Sympathy, http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9A02E3DF153CE633A25754C1A9629C946396D6CF, 16 April 1912, The New York Times]

Justice, Feeling, Imagination, Sense

“It is my conviction and shraddha (faith) that even on economic issues, Gandhi is relevant even today…. So in every aspect of my social reform efforts, you will see the imprint of Gandhi…. I bring every little aspect of Gandhi ji’s life into my work. In social forestry, that is, in planting trees outside forest areas, Gujarat is number one in India… We have also incentivized every village to have a panchvati (a green belt drawing its name from the forest in which Ram, Lakshman, and Sita lived during their years of exile)…. This is part of putting our traditions and Gandhian values to creative use.”

Narendra Modi (1950) Prime Minister of India

Narendra Modi quoted from Kishwar, Madhu (2014). Modi, Muslims and media: Voices from Narendra Modi's Gujarat. p.381-386
2013

Life, Faith, Effort, Tree

“Your case has been reviewed by high-minded
and unprejudiced observers (like hell
they were!) the president of a great
university, the president of a noteworthy
technical school and a judge too old to sit
on the bench, men already rewarded for
their services to pedagogy and the enforcement
of arbitrary statutes. In other words
pimps to tradition”

William Carlos Williams (1883–1963) American poet

"Impromptu: The Suckers"
Collected Poems 1921-1931 (1934)

Men, School, Hell, Universe

“Another tradition in systems theory, known as system dynamics, originated at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The founder of this tradition was Jay Forrester, a creative engineer who invented the magnetic core memory for computers and who built the Whirlwind computer, which is now in the Smithsonian Institution.”

Stuart A. Umpleby (1944) American scientist

Source: "The origins and purposes of several traditions in systems theory and cybernetics," 1999, p. 85: About System Dynamics

Memory

“Modern Scotland is about continuing that traditional welcome for those of all faiths or none, of including those from every part of the world and of every belief in our social mix. That diversity is our strength. That ability to welcome and to accommodate those from other nations and to develop an elastic sense of what it is to be 'Scottish' makes us bigger and better as a nation.”

Alex Salmond (1954) Scottish National Party politician and former First Minister of Scotland

St Andrew's Day (November 30, 2007)

World, Faith, Sense, Parting

“To Donham, the case study stood squarely in the legal and cultural tradition of Anglo-American thought. Unlike French or Spanish law. Donham emphasized, English law was grounded on the doctrine of stare decisis, in which the written case decisions of the past shape, and instantiate, the law. Just as the recording of cases allowed English common law to break the arbitrariness of local law. Donham argued in 1925, business needed to universalize its procedures by itself adopting the case system. The chaos of local law that ruled in England before the common law. Donham contended, "is exactly the same situation that we have [in the world of business] where practically every large corporation is tightly hound by traditions which are precedents in its particular narrow field and narrow held only The recording of decisions from industry to industry [enables] us to start from facts and draw inferences from those facts; [it] will introduce principle… in the field of business to such an extent that it will control executive action in the field where executive action is haphazard or unprincipled or bound by narrow, instead of broad precedent and decision"”

Peter Galison (1955) American physicist

W. Donham, transcript of talk to the Association of Coll. School of Business Committee Reports and Other Literature, 5-7 May 1925. Harvard Business School, box 17, folder 10. 62
Source: Image and Logic, 1997, p. 57, footnote 66

World, School, Law, Literature

“For neo-conservatism is a quintessentially Jewish project: a re-sanctification in everyday life of the core values of western civilisation, and the achievement of human potential through virtuous practice. The neo-cons’ crucial insight is that public signals through law, custom and tradition are the key to getting people to behave well. And that is a Jewish insight.”

Melanie Phillips (1951) British journalist

The Politics of Progress http://www.melaniephillips.com/articles-new/?p=285

Life, People, Law

“The image of the whole of Bharatavarsha being a chakravartikshetra is as old as the oldest Vedic literature. The Itihasa-Purana provide glorious accounts of many chakravartins-Ikshvaku, Puru, Prithu Vainya, Sivi Ausinara, Mandhata, Raghu and so on-who accompanied the ašvamedha horse demanding submission from all kingdoms and republics, big and small, spread all over the country. The rãjasûya yajña which was performed at the end of this campaign was more in the nature of a meeting of equals than a durbar held by a despot in order to humble or humiliate subordinate princes and patriarchs. Sri Krishna had demanded death for Jarasandha because the latter had violated this dharmic tradition of empire-building, and kept a hundred kings captive in his castle. The Nandas had won notoriety as an ignoble dynasty because they had also violated the standard code of conduct laid down by the rãjadharma for righteous emperors, destroyed many local dynasties, and reduced other princes to provincial satraps.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Muslim Separatism – Causes and Consequences (1987)

Death, Literature, Nature, Horse

“The Enlightenment worldview held by Du Bois is ultimately inadequate, and, in many ways, antiquated, for our time. The tragic plight and absurd predicament of Africans here and abroad requires a more profound interpretation of the human condition — one that goes beyond the false dichotomies of expert knowledge vs. mass ignorance, individual autonomy vs. dogmatic authority, and self-mastery vs. intolerant tradition.”

Cornel West book The Future of the Race

The Future of the Race (1997) by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Cornel West, p. 64

Way, Boy, Knowledge, Time

“We are honored for research which is today referred to as the "Two Neutrino Experiment". How does one make this research comprehensible to ordinary people? In fact "The Two Neutrinos" sounds like an Italian dance team. How can we have our colleagues in chemistry, medicine, and especially in literature share with us, not the cleverness of our research, but the beauty of the intellectual edifice, of which our experiment is but one brick? This is a dilemma and an anguish for all scientists because the public understanding of science is no longer a luxury of cultural engagement, but it is an essential requirement for survival in our increasingly technological age: In this context, I believe this Nobel Ceremony with its awesome tradition and pomp has as one of its most important benefits; the public attention it draws to science and its practitioners.”

Leon M. Lederman (1922–2018) American mathematician and physicist

Lederman's speech at the Nobel Banquet, December 10, 1988 http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1988/lederman-speech.html (URL accessed on October 20, 2008)

People, Age, Beauty, Literature

“Historicism runs counter to the specific capacity of the literary work to escape the limits of historical time, to allow for the cross-generational flourishing of tradition, and open the present to a multidimensional temporality.”

Russell Berman (1950) American academic

Source: Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty and Western Culture (2007), p. 20.

Time

“Trudeau keeps pushing his “diversity is our strength” slogan. Yes, Canada is a huge and diverse country. This diversity is part of us and should be celebrated. But where do we draw the line?
Ethnic, religious, linguistic, sexual and other minorities were unjustly repressed in the past. We’ve done a lot to redress those injustices and give everyone equal rights. Canada is today one of the countries where people have the most freedom to express their identity.
But why should we promote ever more diversity? If anything and everything is Canadian, does being Canadian mean something? Shouldn’t we emphasize our cultural traditions, what we have built and have in common, what makes us different from other cultures and societies?
Having people live among us who reject basic Western values such as freedom, equality, tolerance and openness doesn’t make us strong. People who refuse to integrate into our society and want to live apart in their ghetto don’t make our society strong.
Trudeau’s extreme multiculturalism and cult of diversity will divide us into little tribes that have less and less in common, apart from their dependence on government in Ottawa. These tribes become political clienteles to be bought with taxpayers $ and special privileges.
Cultural balkanisation brings distrust, social conflict, and potentially violence, as we are seeing everywhere. It’s time we reverse this trend before the situation gets worse. More diversity will not be our strength, it will destroy what has made us such a great country.”

Maxime Bernier (1963) Canadian politician

12 August 2018 on Twitter https://twitter.com/MaximeBernier/status/1028800406535716864

People, Freedom, Strong, Time

“I am deeply honored, and genuinely humbled with my selection for Brigadier General. With this promotion, I embrace the opportunity to serve in positions of greater responsibility and to continue to lead the amazing Soldiers in the world’s premier Army. While the DoD position is that orientation is a private matter, participating with family in traditional ceremonies such as the promotion is both common and expected of a leader. I was grateful to be surrounded by my family, friends, and co-workers at this special event. Looking at the photos of Tracey’s joy as she pins the star on my shoulder is a memory that will imprint my heart forever. Her support keeps me Army Strong.”

Tammy Smith (1963) United States Army officer

Quoted on Out Serve Magazine, "Brig. Gen. Tammy Smith Makes Statemant" http://outservemag.com/2012/08/brig-gen-tammy-smith-makes-statement/, August 16, 2013.

World, Family, Photo, Star

“Democratic governments are not suited to the publication of the thunderous revelations I am in the habit of making. The unpublished parts will appear later.... when Europe will have restored its traditional monarchies.”

Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) Spanish artist

Source: Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1961 - 1970, Diary of a Genius (1964), p. 2

Appearance, Parting

“In considering our traditional ties with the Commonwealth we should remember that it now differs greatly from the entity which existed 20 or 30 years ago. Many of us do not feel quite the same allegiance to Archbishop Makarios or Doctor Nkrumah or to people like Jomo Kenyatta as we do towards Mr. Menzies of Australia.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Speech to Finchley Conservatives (14 August 1961) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument.asp?docid=101105 Backbench MP

People, Feeling

“Today and over the foreseeable future, traditional capitalism throughout most of the world has been thrown on a defensive from which it is doubtful that it can never recover.”

Robert L. Heilbroner (1919–2005) American historian and economist

Source: The Future As History (1960), Chapter II, Part 7, The Drift Away From Capitalism, p. 94

World, Future

“The link between Communism and traditional Christianity is so close that when Communists lose their faith, they usually and naturally flop over into Roman Catholicism. Whittaker Chambers was only the best known of the Marxists who, when disillusioned, reverted to an earlier form of his ruling superstition. Would-be atheists who do not become converted to the Marxist cult often retain in their minds the Christian residue that makes them susceptible to drivel about "all mankind," "One World," and the "humanitarian" sentimentality of do-gooders and similar pests--all of which find no confirmation in the facts of nature and the real world. There are even self-styled atheists who evidently think that the god in whom they do not believe stopped the biological evolution of anthropoids a hundred thousand years ago to make all talking species equal in some mysterious way that transcends the obvious and great difference between extant races in intelligence, character, and instincts, perhaps because the non-existing god equipped the several species with exactly equal souls.”

Revilo P. Oliver (1908–1994) American philologist

"The Bear in the Bush", Liberty Bell (September 1990)
1990s

God, World, Faith, Way

“Aristocrats (among Hebrews and Greeks) often had harems that included women of common or even servile origin, as well as well-born aristocratic ladies. Normally, the successors would be chosen from the sons born by ladies; but on occasion those born by servile or common wives achieved the ascendency. In the latter case, tradition could dwell on the phenomenon as "worthy of saga."”

Cyrus H. Gordon (1908–2001) American linguist

Source: The Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations (1965 [1962]), Ch.VIII Further Observations on the Bible

Women

“Regional Banks that are constrained to lend within a particular area are a necessary part of the institutional ecology in that they resist the centralising power of capital, allow a more stable access to credit for regional and smaller businesses and encourage relationships and reciprocity to constrain the demand for higher rates of return that have decimated the mutual bank sector in Britain. They also offer an alternative to usurious lending, one of the great growth areas in our economy. Any serious reflection on ‘employment policies’ must confront the centralisation of capital and the state and seek to constrain both through the endowment of decentralised regional and sectoral institutions that constrain centralisation and preserve and renew traditions of virtue within the economy through resisting the commodification of human beings, nature and knowledge demanded by the maximum return on investment. It allows initiative and enterprise to be oriented towards the future.”

Maurice Glasman, Baron Glasman (1961) British philosopher

The Politics of Employment, 23 May 2013 http://togetherforthecommongood.co.uk/viewpoints/opinion-pieces/articles/maurice-glasman.html

Business, Nature, Knowledge, Future

“It is a strong argument for democracy that governments regulated by principles of accountability, respect for public opinion and the supremacy of just laws are more likely than an all-powerful ruler or ruling class, uninhibited by the need to honour the will of the people, to observe the traditional duties of Buddhist kingship. Traditional values serve both to justify and to decipher popular expectations of democratic government.”

Aung San Suu Kyi (1945) State Counsellor of Myanmar and Leader of the National League for Democracy

In Quest of Democracy (1991)

People, Law, Democracy, Strong

“Children who need to be taught to respect traditional moral values are being taught that they have an inalienable right to be gay.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Speech to Conservative Party Conference (9 October 1987) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument.asp?docid=106941 Third term as Prime Minister

Children

“BlackBerry isn't getting out of the hardware business. It stands alone as the only smartphone company exclusively focused on business, security and traditional communication. Until someone else steps up to meet this need, there continues to be a market for its hardware …”

Rob Enderle (1954) American financial analyst

BlackBerry Misinformation and the Smartphone Security Crisis http://itbusinessedge.com/blogs/unfiltered-opinion/blackberry-misinformation-and-the-smartphone-security-crisis.html in IT Business Edge (8 July 2016)

Communication, Business

“The end of the negotiations is a blow to the cause of the wider European unity for which we have been striving. We are a part of Europe, by geography, history, culture, tradition and civilization … There have been times in the history of Europe when it has been only too plain how European we are; and there have been many millions of people who have been grateful for it. I say to my colleagues: they should have no fear. We in Britain are not going to turn out backs on the mainland of Europe or the countries of the Community.”

Edward Heath (1916–2005) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1970–1974)

Speech at European conference after France vetoed the British application to join the EEC (28 January 1963), quoted in Edward Heath, The Course of My Life (Hodder and Stoughton, 1998), p. 235.
Lord Privy Seal

People, Fear, History, Communication

“Starting from 1993 in Otaru, Hokkaidō, and now running unchecked throughout Japan, signs saying 'Japanese Only' have gone up, making an unspoken undercurrent of fear of the outsider into clear, present, and brazen exclusionism — following the best traditions of segregation and apartheid.”

Debito Arudou (1965) Author/activist with Japanese citizenship born in the USA

"The Rogues' Gallery: Photos of Places in Japan which Exclude or Restrict non-Japanese Customers," http://www.debito.org/roguesgallery.html Debito.Org (last revised November 2007)

Fear