Customs Quotes

Moralities, ethics, laws, customs, beliefs, doctrines - these are of trifling import. All that matters is that the miraculous become the norm. (Henry Miller)
If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay at home. View quote
James A. Michener
Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art. View quote
John Updike
In our world, in which religious images are losing their meaning, in which our customs are getting more and more secular, we are losing our sense of the eternal. I think it's a loss that has done a great deal of damage to modern art. Painting is a return to origins. View quote
Antoni Tàpies
The law is an adroit mixture of customs that are beneficial to society, and could be followed even if no law existed, and others that are of advantage to a ruling minority, but harmful to the masses of men, and can be enforced on them only by terror. View quote
Peter Kropotkin
Laws are sand, customs are rock. Laws can be evaded and punishment escaped, but an openly transgressed custom brings sure punishment. View quote
Mark Twain
The Roman state stands by ancient customs, and its manhood. View quote
Ennius
I think that's because believable action is based on authenticity, and accuracy is very important to me. I always spend time researching my novels, exploring the customs and attitudes of the county I'm using for their setting. View quote
Sidney Sheldon
I always spend time exploring the customs and attitudes of the countries I'm using for locations, and interviewing the people who live there. I've visited over 90 countries thus far. View quote
Sidney Sheldon
Geniuses and supergeniuses always make their own rules on sex as on everything else; they do not accept the monkey customs of their lessers. View quote
Robert A. Heinlein
In America, conscription is unknown; men are enlisted for payment. Compulsory recruitment is so alien to the ideas and so foreign to the customs of the people of the United States that I doubt whether they would ever dare to introduce it into their law. (Alexis de Tocqueville)
No nation can rise to the height of glory unless your women are side by side with you. We are victims of evil customs. View quote
Muhammad Ali Jinnah
Not safe?” I asked, all innocence. "Surely it isn't illegal here to complain about young people these days? How cruel. I had thought it a basic part of human nature, one of the few universally practiced human customs. View quote
Ann Leckie
Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature. View quote
George Bernard Shaw
The customs of that most criminal nation have gained such strength that they have now been received in all lands. The conquered have given laws to the conquerors. View quote
Seneca
Men of sense in all ages abhor those customs which treat us only as the vassals of your sex. View quote
Abigail Adams
We are citizens of an age, as well as of a State; and if it is held to be unseemly, or even inadmissible, for a man to cut himself off from the customs and manners of the circle in which he lives, why should it be less of a duty, in the choice of his activity, to submit his decision to the needs and the taste of his century? View quote
Friedrich Schiller
Laws and customs may be creative of vice; and should be therefore perpetually under process of observation and correction: but laws and customs cannot be creative of virtue: they may encourage and help to preserve it; but they cannot originate it. View quote
Harriet Martineau
For if one should propose to all men a choice, bidding them select the best customs from all the customs that there are, each race of men, after examining them all, would select those of his own people; thus all think that their own customs are by far the best. View quote
Herodotus
The legislator commands the future; to be feeble will avail him nothing: it is for him to will what is good and to perpetuate it; to make man what he desires to be: for the laws, working upon the social body, which is inert in itself, can produce either virtue or crime, civilized customs or savagery. View quote
Louis Antoine de Saint-Just
He sees that this great roundabout; The world, with all its motley rout, Church, army, physic, law, Its customs and its businesses, Is no concern at all of his, And says -- what says he -- Caw. (William Cowper)
Sport carries on without deviation the mechanical tradition of furnishing relief and distraction to the worker after he has finished his work proper so that he is at no time independent of one technique or another. In sport the citizen of the technical society finds the same spirit, criteria, morality, actions and objectives in short, all the technical laws and customs which he encounters in office or factory. View quote
Jacques Ellul
It is one of history's most mocking ironies that the German customs union, which set out to dominate Europe and conquer Britain in the form of Bismarckian or Hitlerian military force, has at last vanquished the victor by drawing Britain into a Zollverein which comprises Western Europe and aspires to comprise the Mediterranean as well. If the ghosts of the Hohenzollerns come back to haunt this planet, they must find a lot to laugh at. View quote
Enoch Powell
...the importance of recovering the customs and the institutions of the past thus inaugurating the archaeological approach to art. View quote
Raja Ravi Varma
I'm trapped in a fun-house mirror reflection of a historical society where everyone was crazy by default, driven mad by irrational laws and meaningless customs. View quote
Charles Stross