The strongest continuous thread in America's political tradition is skepticism about government.
I decided that I wanted to explore all kinds of music with my cello, not just the Western classical tradition. I just wanted to try and expand my vocabulary and bring that different kind of music to my audience.
Americans are always mortified when I tell them this, but in England, it's a tradition to put your plaques and photographs and awards and gold records and stuff in your bathroom. I don't know why.
Custom reconciles us to everything.
The urge to break with a tradition is only appropriate when you're dealing with an outdated, troublesome tradition: I never really thought about that because I take the old-fashioned approach of equating tradition with value (which may be a failing).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.
The numerous ecstatic traditions - including free jazz and funk - have all been great inspirations.
The Occultists, however, know that the traditions of Esoteric Philosophy must be the right ones, simply because they are the most logical, and reconcile every difficulty.
A house should be a synthesis of comfort, practicality, and tradition.
There is a sinister anachronistic interpretation of the aesthetic state as some kind of totalitarian regime that puts aesthetic over moral standards; one associates it with national-socialism. But this has nothing to do with the romantics, whose ideal of the aesthetic state has much more to do with the republican tradition.
The use of history is to tell us what we are, for at our birth we are nearly empty vessels and we become what our tradition pours into us.
I have enormous respect for Derek Parfit, although he seems to me bound within an unfortunate philosophical tradition - rather like the extraordinarily brilliant exponents of Ptolemaic astronomy in the Middle Ages.
The dead govern the living.
Innovation violates tradition--attacks it in public and steals from it in private.
To the extent that I come from a deeply religious tradition and have been contending with those beginnings all of my life - that constitutes the subject of much of my early fiction.
We are more sensible of what is done against custom than against nature.
Tradition can, to be sure, participate in a creation, but it can no longer be creative itself.
I sort of hate the novel when it doesn't push, restlessly, against the tradition and the traditional.
When I do older folk songs, I'm not doing them because they're old. I have no interest in reviving or continuing a tradition. I'm just doing them because they're great songs.
Scientists are the enemies of tradition , and tradition own all the prisons. - Victor Vigny
When you're entrusted with a tradition, you've got to protect it.