Customs Quotes - Page 24

• Customs form us all, our thoughts, our morals, our most fixed beliefs; are consequences of our place of birth.

  Aaron Hill

  Belief, Moral, Birth

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• It is not the custom of kings to kill kings.

  Saladin

  Kings

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• For over two thousand years it has been the custom among earnest moralists to decry happiness as something degraded and unworthy

  Bertrand Russell

  Years, Two, Morality

  Bertrand Russell (2009). “Bertrand Russell's Best”, p.120, Routledge

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• We are the number one custom yacht builder in the world and my goal is to stay there

  Felix Sabates

  Numbers, Goal, World

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• If you wish to draw off the people from a bad or wicked custom, you must beat up for a march; you must make an excitement, do something that everybody will notice.

  Lewis Tappan

  People, Wicked, Wish

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• The crisis is arrived when we must assert our rights, or submit to every imposition, that can be heaped upon us, till custom and use shall make us as tame and abject slaves, as the blacks we rule over with such arbitrary sway.

  George Washington

  Rights, Arbitrary, Use

  George Washington, John Clement Fitzpatrick, David Maydole Matteson, United States George Washington Bicentennial Commission (1944). “The writings of George Washington from the original manuscript sources, 1745-1799: prepared under the direction of the United States George Washington bicentennial commission and published by authority of Congress”

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• Roughly speaking, the President of the United States knows what his job is. Constitution and custom spell it out, for him as well as for us. His wife has no such luck. The First Lady has no rules; rather each new woman must make her own.

  Shana Alexander

  Jobs, America, Wife

  Shana Alexander (1976). “Talking woman”

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• The whole drift of our law is toward the absolute prohibition of all ideas that diverge in the slightest form from the accepted platitudes, and behind that drift of law there is a far more potent force of growing custom, and under that custom there is a natural philosophy which erects conformity into the noblest of virtues and the free functioning of personality into a capital crime against society.

  H. L. Mencken

  Freedom, Philosophy, Ideas

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• It is the custom to sneer at the modern apartment-house, television, big-city Christmas, with its commercial taint . . . office parties, artificial . . . Christmas trees . . . but future generations in search of their lost Christmases may well remember its innocence; yes, and its beauty, too.

  Paul Gallico

  Beauty, Party, Cities

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• He that would travel for the entertainment of others, should remember that the great object of remark is human life. Every Nation has something peculiar in its Manufactures, its Works of Genius, its Medicines, its Agriculture, its Customs, and its Policy. He only is a useful Traveller, who brings home something by which his country may be benefited; who procures some supply of Want, or some mitigation of Evil, which may enable his readers to compare their condition with that of others, to improve it whenever it is worse, and whenever it is better to enjoy it.

  Samuel Johnson

  Country, Home, Medicine

  "The Idler".

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• The most useful truths are always universal, and unconnected with accidents and customs.

  Samuel Johnson

  Humanity, Universal, Accidents

  Samuel Johnson (1804). “The beauties of Samuel Johnson: maxims and observations. To which are now added, biographical anecdotes of the doctor, his life [&c.].”, p.368

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• Very little of the great cruelty shown by men can really be attributed to cruel instinct. Most of it comes from thoughtlessness or inherited habit. The roots of cruelty, therefore, are not so much strong as widespread. But the time must come when inhumanity protected by custom and thoughtlessness will succumb before humanity championed by thought. Let us work that this time may come.

  Albert Schweitzer

  Strong, Philosophical, Animal

  "Memoirs of Childhood and Youth". Book by Albert Schweitzer, 1924.

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• ...and we have so far improved upon the custom of Adam and Eve, that we generally furnish forth our feasts with a portion of some delicate calf or lamb, whose unspotted innocence entitles them to the happiness of becoming our sustenance.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

  Animal, Humanity, Lambs

  Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, Nicholas R. Lawrence, Marta L. Werner (2005). “Ordinary Mysteries: The Common Journal of Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne, 1842-1843”, p.7, American Philosophical Society

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• Nothing is more powerful than custom or habit.

  Ovid

  Powerful, Power, Habit

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• Never can custom conquer nature, for she is ever unconquered.

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Tradition, Conquer

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• Sex is difficult, yes. But they are difficult things with which we have been charged...If you only recognize this and manage out of yourself, out of your own nature and ways, out of your own experience and childhood and strength to achieve a relation to sex wholly your own (not influenced by convention and custom) then you need no longer be afraid of losing yourself and becoming unworthy of your best possession.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Sex, Childhood, Needs

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• Learn to pay attention to your body with the relaxed attitude of gratitude, trust, curiosity and unconditional love rather than being pushed around by habit, fear, anxiety, social customs, other people's schedules and other people's ideas about what is good for you.

  Wallace D. Wattles

  Gratitude, Attitude, Unconditional Love

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• One judges an epoch as much by its Art as by its customs.

  Henri Gaudier-Brzeska

  Art, Judging, Epoch

  Letter to Sophie Brzeska-Savage Messiah By Harold Stanley (Jim) Ede, 1931.

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• ..all arguments concerning existence are founded on the relation of cause and effect; that our knowledge of that relation is derived entirely from experience; and all our experimental conclusions proceed upon the supposition that the future will be conformable to the past. .... Without the influence of custom, we should be entirely ignorant of every matter of fact beyond what is immediately present to the memory and senses.

  David Hume

  Memories, Past, Words Of Wisdom

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• We must hold a man amenable to reason for the choice of his daily craft or profession. It is not an excuse any longer for his deeds that they are the custom of his trade. What business has he with an evil trade?

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Business, Men, Evil

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2008). “The Spiritual Emerson: Essential Works by Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.45, Penguin

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• I came to accept that I have no right whatsoever to judge others in terms of my own customs, however much I may be proud of such customs.

  Nelson Mandela

  Inspiring, Judging, May

  Nelson Mandela (2011). “Nelson Mandela By Himself: The Authorised Book of Quotations”, p.101, Pan Macmillan

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• If you ask an Auin Bushman what realty happens at the puberty ceremonials, he will tell you, "We dance." In the initiation customs of all peoples the dances play an especially important part. The dance is the center of wedding festivities.

  Curt Sachs

  Dance, Play, Dancing

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• It must be therefore, since the enemies of the Jews belonged to the most diverse races, since they lived in countries very distant from each other, since they were ruled by very different laws, governed by opposite principles, since they had neither the same morals, nor the same customs, since they were animated by unlike dispositions which did not permit them to judge of anything in the same way, it must be therefore that the general cause of anti-Semitism has always resided in Israel itself and not in those who have fought against Israel.

  Bernard Lazare

  Country, Race, Israel

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• One reason that the task of inventing manners is so difficult is that etiquette is folk custom, and people have emotional ties to the forms of their youth. That is why there is such hostility between generations in times of rapid change; their manners being different, each feels affronted by the other, taking even the most surface choices for challenges.

  Judith Martin

  Emotional, Ties, People

  Judith Martin (1996). “Common courtesy: in which Miss Manners solves the problem that baffled Mr. Jefferson”

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• Thank God we're going to try to continue and effectively defend our frontiers with the Border Patrol, with the Customs Department, with the Coast Guard, with the Armed Forces.

  Barry McCaffrey

  Thank God, Trying, Borders

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