Customs Quotes - Page 22

• For the most part we inherit our opinions. We are the heirs of habits and mental customs. Our beliefs, like the fashion of our garments, depend on where we were born. We are molded and fashioned by our surroundings.

  Robert Green Ingersoll

  Fashion, Heirs, Belief

  Robert Green Ingersoll (2004). “Superstition and Other Essays”

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• I resolved to claim for my sex all that an impartial Creator had bestowed, which, by custom and a perverted application of the Scriptures, had been wrested from woman.

  Lucretia Mott

  Sex, Scripture, Claims

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• The despotism of custom is on the wane. We are not content to know that things are; we ask whether they ought to be.

  John Stuart Mill

  Despotism, Ought, Knows

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• Living in England has no such excuse:
  These are my customs and establishments.

  Philip Larkin

  Home, England, Excuse

  Philip Larkin (2012). “The Whitsun Weddings”, p.32, Faber & Faber

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• There are four chief obstacles in grasping truth ... namely, submission to faulty and unworthy authority, influence of custom, popular prejudice, and the concealment of our own ignorance accompanied by an ostentatious display of our knowledge.

  Roger Bacon

  Ignorance, Prejudice, Four

  Roger Bacon (2016). “Opus Majus, Volumes 1 and 2”, p.4, University of Pennsylvania Press

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• The tone and tendency of liberalism...is to attack the institutions of the country under the name of reform and to make war on the manners and customs of the people under the pretext of progress.

  Benjamin Disraeli

  Country, War, Names

  Benjamin Disraeli (Earl of Beaconsfield) (1886). “Wit and Wisdom of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield: Collected from His Writings and Speeches”

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• According to the law of custom, and perhaps of reason, foreign travel completes the education of an English gentleman.

  Edward Gibbon

  Law, Gentleman, Reason

  Edward Gibbon (1826). “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, p.540

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• It used to be the custom in this country that when you had made a career and were mature in judgment, you went to the Senate to give something back t the Republic. The idea that at age 25 you go out and buy a blow dryer and starting running for office is not what the founders had in mind

  Gore Vidal

  Running, Country, Blow

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• The old culture had come out of poverty, out of English customs.

  Charlie Munger

  Culture, Poverty, Old Culture

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• Travelers learn not just foreign customs and curious cuisines and unfamiliar beliefs and novel forms of government. They learn, if they are lucky, humility.

  Paul Fussell

  Humility, Government, Lucky

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• Rule by the statist elite is not benign or simply a matter of who happens to be in office: it is rule by a growing army of leeches and parasites battening off the income and wealth of hard-working Americans, destroying their property, corrupting their customs and institutions, sneering at their religion.

  Murray Rothbard

  Hard Work, Army, Office

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• The moral, then, is that familiar categories of behavior - marriage customs, food taboos, folk superstitions, and so on - certainly do vary across cultures and have to be learned, but the deeper mechanisms of mental computation that generate them may be universal and innate.

  Steven Pinker

  Culture, May, Superstitions

  Steven Pinker (2003). “The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature”, p.66, Penguin

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• Language surely does affect our thoughts, rather than just labeling them for the sake of labeling them. Most obviously, language is the conduit through which people share their thoughts and intentions and thereby acquire the knowledge, customs, and values of those around them."

  Steven Pinker

  People, Doe, Sake

  Steven Pinker (2003). “The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature”, p.283, Penguin

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• The heart is naturally hard, and grows harder by custom in sin, especially by long abuse of mercy, neglect of the means of grace, and resisteing the spirit of grace.

  Richard Baxter

  Religious, Heart, Mean

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• Keep to the ancient way and custom of the Church, established and confirmed by so many Saints under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. And live a new life. Pray, and get others to pray, that God not abandon His Church, but reform it as He pleases, and as He sees best for us, and more to His honor and glory.

  Angela Merici

  Inspiration, Honor, Church

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• I remember when I posed as a customs officer so that I could meet Oscar Wilde. I said to him "Have you anything to declare?" He said "I have nothing to declare but my genius." I said "I'll put that down as nothing then shall I?" For I am the wittiest man on Earth.

  Simon Munnery

  Men, Genius, Earth

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• I detest tradition for tradition's sake; the half-alive; that which is not real. I feel no hatred of individuals, but of customs, traditions; superstitions that go against life, against truth, against the reality of experience, against the spontaneous living out of the sense of wonder-of fresh experience, freshly seen and communicated.

  Alfred Stieglitz

  Real, Hatred, Half

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• Entrenched customs represent a social equilibrium, and moving away from that equilibrium is difficult to do on your own.

  Megan McArdle

  Moving, Social, Equilibrium

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• A convention is a social pattern we have chosen to prefer over whatever the raw world simply proffers. It is a sign of the operation of the mind, drawing the assent of a sufficient number of other minds so that the agreement will be widely operative. A convention is not a custom; a custom is a habit in which a sufficient number acquiesce. A custom can appear as a convention, but it is really a lesser act, the result of passive acceptance rather than of the imposition of design. It is the difference between learning to live by the annual flooding of the river or by a calendar.

  A. Bartlett Giamatti

  Acceptance, Agreement, Rivers

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• Apart from letters, it is the vulgar custom of the moment to deride the thinkers of the Victorian and Edwardian eras; yet there has not been, in all history, another agewhen so much sheer mental energy was directed toward creating a fairer social order.

  Ellen Glasgow

  Thoughtful, Thinking, Order

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• The more efficient causes of progress seem to consist of a good education during youth whilst the brain is impressible, and of a high standard of excellence, inculcated by the ablest and best men, embodied in the laws, customs and traditions of the nation, and enforced by public opinion.

  Charles Darwin

  Men, Law, Brain

  Charles Darwin (2016). “The Descent of Man (Diversion Classics)”, p.199, Diversion Books

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• Mythology is the study of whatever religious or heroic legends are so foreign to a student's experience that he cannot believe them to be true. . . . Myth has two main functions. The first is to answer the sort of awkward questions that children ask, such as: 'Who made the world? How will it end? Who was the first man? Where do souls go after death?'. . . . The second function of myth is to justify an existing social system and account for traditional rites and customs.

  Robert Graves

  Religious, Children, Believe

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• The custom and fashion of today will be the awkwardness and outrage of tomorrow - so arbitrary are these transient laws.

  Alexandre Dumas

  Fashion, Law, Awkward

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• One road to happiness is to cultivate curiosity about everything. Not only about people but about subjects, not only about the arts but about history and foreign customs. Not only about countries and cities, but about plants and animals. Not only about lichened rocks and curious markings on the bark of trees, but about stars and atoms. Not only about your friends but about that strange labyrinth we inhabit which we call ourselves. Then, if we do that, we will never suffer a moment's boredom.

  Gerald Brenan

  Happiness, Happy, Country

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• Believers may come from different cultures, countries, or customs, but we serve one God who unites us all.

  Dillon Burroughs

  Country, Different, Culture

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