382 Quotes About Tradition

It is true that a great statesman is he who knows when to depart from traditions, as well as when to adhere to them. But it is a great mistake to suppose that he will do this better for being ignorant of the traditions.

Few except the poor preserve traditions. Aristocrats live not in traditions but in fashions.

Precisely because we have embarked on the great and long venture of demolishing a world that has grown old and of rebuilding it authentically anew, i.e. historically, we must know the tradition. We must know more—i.e. our knowledge must be stricter and more binding—than all the epochs before us, even the most revolutionary. Only the most radical historical knowledge can make us aware of our extraordinary tasks and preserve us from a new wave of mere restoration and uncreative imitation.

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.

As never before, he understood the vitality of tradition, the dignity of the worship of what had existed before one's own self had come into being. There was no shame in awe; there was exaltation. (“Cafe Endless: Spring Rain”)

I am an anarch in space, a metahistorian in time. Hence I am committed to neither the political present nor tradition; I am blank and also open and potent in any direction. Dear old Dad, in contrast, still pours his wine into the same decaying old wineskins, he still believes in a constitution when nothing and no one constitutes anything.

History is local. A shared sense of history is possible only on the basis of the domination of one society over another, and imposing its own history and, thus, its identity on the enslaved one.

Pulling down statues of rock from their high placeswe must level the expectationupon which they standwaiting for usto fulfill their imagewaitingfor our feet to replace them.Unless we refuse to sleepeven one night in houses of marblethe sight of our children's false pleasurewill undo usfor our children have grownin the shadow of what wasthe shape of marblebetween their eyes and the sunbut we do not wish to standlike great marble statuesbetween our children's eyesand their sun.

We did not have books on Emerson. That place where we lost our language, lost ourselves. They told us we had no history but darkness, so they kept the books away for fear we might understand the truth better, and thus find those lost selves.