“Tradition! We scarcely know the word anymore. We are afraid to be either proud of our ancestors or ashamed of them. We cling to a bourgeois mediocrity which would make it appear we are all Americans, made in the image and likeness of George Washington.”
Dorothy Day, “The Long Loneliness,” pt. 1, 1952

“In America nothing dies easier than tradition.”
Russell Baker, “New York Times”, May 14, 1991

“Whether he is aware of it or not, every human being dwells in tradition and history. Human memory is this constant dwelling in tradition. It constitutes that fundamental human characteristic of historicity.”
Medard Boss

“Habit is habit, and not to be thrown out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time.”
Mark Twain

“Tradition does not mean that the living are dead, it means that the dead are living.”
Harold Macmillan

“There is nothing sacred about convention; there is nothing sacred about primitive passions or whims; but the fact that a convention exists indicates that a way of living has been devised capable of maintaining itself.”
George Santayana

“The way of the world is to praise dead saints and persecute living ones.”
Nathaniel Howe

“When you are accustomed to anything, you are estranged from it.”
George Cabot Lodge

“Tradition is the illusion of permanance.”
Woody Allen

“Often, the less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it.”
Mark Twain

“The Bible is a mass of fables and traditions, mere mythology.”
Mark Twain

“Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.”
G. K. Chesterton

“We learn simply by the exposure of living, and what we learn most natively is the tradition in which we live.”
David P. Gardner

“It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.”
Henry James