Tradition Quotes

Tradition is a guide and not a jailer. (W. Somerset Maugham)
I was raised in the Jewish tradition, taught never to marry a Gentile woman, shave on a Saturday night and, most especially, never to shave a Gentile woman on a Saturday night. View quote
Woody Allen
In America nothing dies easier than tradition. View quote
Russell Baker
Teaching is not a lost art, but regard for teaching is a lost tradition. View quote
Jacques Barzun
The intellectual tradition is one of servility to power, and if I didn't betray it I'd be ashamed of myself. View quote
Noam Chomsky
It is almost an intellectual tradition to pay heed to the insane. In my case those that I most respect are the morons. View quote
Henri Michaux
The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. View quote
Alfred North Whitehead
Tradition is the illusion of permanance. View quote
Woody Allen
It is a fine thing to establish one's own religion in one's heart, not to be dependent on tradition and second-hand ideals. Life will seem to you, later, not a lesser, but a greater thing. View quote
D. H. Lawrence
Tradition wears a snowy beard, romance is always young. View quote
John Greenleaf Whittier
People need religion. It's a vehicle for a moral tradition. A crucial role. Nothing can take its place. (Irving Kristol)
Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse. View quote
Winston Churchill
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. View quote
Alfred Brendel
You must be in tune with the times and prepared to break with tradition. View quote
James Agee
I call myself a traditionalist, although I have fought against tradition all my life. View quote
Philip Johnson
Tradition is an important help to history, but its statements should be carefully scrutinized before we rely on them. View quote
Joseph Addison
Our enemy is by tradition our savior, in preventing us from superficiality. View quote
Joyce Carol Oates
The youth of America is their oldest tradition. It has been going on now for 300 years. View quote
Oscar Wilde
I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains. View quote
James A. Michener
I like you and your book, ingenious Hone In whose capacious all-embracing leaves The very marrow of tradition 's shown And all that history, much that fiction weaves. View quote
Charles Lamb
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)
Don't talk to me about Naval tradition. It's nothing but rum, sodomy, and the lash. View quote
Winston Churchill
A love for tradition has never weakened a nation, indeed it has strengthened nations in their hour of peril. View quote
Winston Churchill
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. View quote
Mark Strand
A poet clings to his own tradition and avoids internationalism. View quote
Salvatore Quasimodo