#traditions

Far from being the product of a democratic revolution and of an opposition to English institutions, the constitution of the United States was the result of a powerful reaction against democracy, and in favor of the traditions of the mother country. ↗

— John Acton

#being #constitution #country #democracy #democratic

I am a journalist in the field of etiquette. I try to find out what the most genteel people regularly do, what traditions they have discarded, what compromises they have made. ↗

— Amy Vanderbilt

#compromises #discarded #etiquette #field #find

The traditions of a nation are very important and the anthem written by Francis Scott Key in the early days of our nation should always be revered. ↗

— Lee Greenwood

#anthem #days #early #francis #important

If I have smashed the traditions, it was because I knew no traditions. ↗

— Maude Adams

#i #knew #smashed #traditions

War on terrorism defines the central preoccupation of the United States in the world today, and it does reflect in my view a rather narrow and extremist vision of foreign policy of the world's first superpower, of a great democracy, with genuinely idealistic traditions. ↗

— Zbigniew Brzezinski

#defines #democracy #does #extremist #first

Traditions that cease to evolve render themselves irrelevant or obsolete. And what's the problem with inventing new performance practices? Are customs being slandered? Do successful alternative diminish the value of traditional ones? *The argument that musicians must embrace conventional rituals is just as perilous as unilaterally rejecting them.* ↗

— David Cutler

#music #musicians #performance #performance-practice #traditions

Alas, all traditions lose their primal purity and we all fail our founders. ↗

— Karen Armstrong

#fail #founders #lose #our #primal

I have a great advantage over many of my colleagues inasmuch as my students bring with them to class their own personal knowledge of national, regional, religious, ethnic, occupational, and family folklore traditions. ↗

— Alan Dundes

#bring #class #colleagues #ethnic #family

prepare your food in keeping with monastic traditions—simple, basic, healthy, balanced. ↗

— Mary DeTurris Poust

#food #monastic-traditions #simplicity #food

When distinction of any kind, even intellectual distinction, is somehow resented as a betrayal of the American spirit of equal opportunity for all, the result must be just this terror of individualistic impulses setting us apart, either above or below our neighbours; just this determination to obey without questioning and to subscribe with passion to the conventions and traditions. The dilemma becomes a very real one: How can this sense of democratic equality be made compatible with respect for exceptional personalities or great minds? How can democracy, as we understand it today, with its iron repression of the free spirit, its monotonous standardisation of everything, learn to cherish an intellectual aristocracy without which any nation runs the risk of becoming a civilisation of the commonplace and the second-rate? ↗

— Harold Edmund Stearns

#civilization #conventions #distinction #equality #individualism