"You do not understand your own tradition if you do not see it in relation to others."
A tradition is a system of beliefs or behaviors passed down within a group of people or society with symbolic meaning or special significance with origins in the past. A component of cultural expressions and folklore, common examples include holidays or impractical but socially meaningful clothes, but the idea has also been applied to social norms and behaviors such as greetings. Traditions can pe
"Precedents are not mere dusty phrases, which do not substantially affect the question before us. A precedent embalms a principle. The principle may be right or may be wrong—that is a question for discussion; but at the first glance it is right to conclude that it is a principle that has been acted upon and recognised by those who preceded us."
Tradition"The time-honoured tradition of the human race ... is around and about us and within us; we cannot think except in the forms and processes of thought which it supplies. Is it possible to doubt and to test it? and if possible, is it right?We shall find reason to answer that it is not only possible and right, but our bounden duty; that the main purpose of the tradition itself is to supply us with the means of asking questions, of testing and inquiring into things; that if we misuse it, and take it as a collection of cut-and-dried statements to be accepted without further inquiry, we are not only injuring ourselves here, but, by refusing to do our part towards the building up of the fabric which shall be inherited by our children, we are tending to cut off ourselves and our race from the human line."
Tradition"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 the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about."
Tradition"A tradition without intelligence is not worth having."
Tradition"Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. Throw away the solution and you get the problem back."
Tradition"Tradition serves as the link with prior generations, stretching into the distant and unknown past and at the same time into an equally distant and unknown future. It is a form of ritual, a constant form in a world that otherwise changes and dies, which by its very immutability serves as a reminder of and a link to the realm of the eternal and changeless. Just as attending the changeless rites of a liturgy transports the worshipper from the grimy streets into the realm of God, treating a novel or contemporary subject in a traditional form removes it from its current time and place and places it in the realm of ideas, eternal and changeless."
Tradition