Get off your horse and drink your milk.

Thanksgiving dinners take eighteen hours to prepare. They are consumed in twelve minutes. Half-times take twelve minutes. This is not coincidence.

Fishing is much more than fish. It is the great occasion when we may return to the fine simplicity of our forefathers.

I felt we must separate political responsibility. The Dalai Lama should not carry that burden. So that is my selfish reason – to protect the old Dalai Lama tradition. It is safer without political involvement.

I’ve been known to have a good step or two. I’m half Samoan, you know, and part of our culture is singing and dancing daily.

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 that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.

Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.

I got a chain letter by fax. It’s very simple. You just fax a dollar bill to everybody on the list.

Many Tibetans sacrifice their lives.

A lot of truth is said in jest.

Opportunity makes a thief.

People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.

Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.

Becoming a ‚Sir‘ is slightly uncomfortable at first, although it is a considerable honor. It is amazing how quickly you become accustomed to it.

What ‚multiculturalism‘ boils down to is that you can praise any culture in the world except Western culture – and you cannot blame any culture in the world except Western culture.

A fool and his money are soon elected.

In the West, as well as some other parts of the world, the personal sense of ego tends to predominate, whereas in other areas, there is a more collective sense of ego. This collective ego emphasizes the ‚we‘ rather than the ‚I.‘

There was a time when people said, ‚Jim, if you keep on making faces, your face will freeze like that.‘ Now they just say, ‚Pay him!‘

All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.

Geologists have a saying – rocks remember.

Part of our tradition as black women is that we are universalists. Black children, yellow children, red children, brown children, that is the black woman’s normal, day-to-day relationship. In my family alone, we are about four different colors.

I think ‚Hail to the Chief‘ has a nice ring to it.

I never leaf through a copy of National Geographic without realizing how lucky we are to live in a society where it is traditional to wear clothes.

Yes, the Bible should be taught in our schools because it is necessary to understand the Bible if we are to truly understand our own culture and how it came to be. The Bible has influenced every part of western culture from our art, music, and history, to our sense of fairness, charity, and business.

Autobiography is awfully seductive; it’s wonderful. Once I got into it, I realized I was following a tradition established by Frederick Douglass – the slave narrative – speaking in the first-person singular, talking about the first-person plural, always saying ‚I,‘ meaning ‚we.‘

If the Christian is a restorationist, a legalist, if he wants everything clear and safe, then he will find nothing. Tradition and memory of the past must help us to have the courage to open up new areas to God.

My parents had us in church every Sunday, every Wednesday. It was more of a tradition at that point; I didn’t have a personal relationship with the Lord until I went to the altar call one Sunday, and the youth pastor told us to make a decision for ourselves.

Our modern society – especially in the West, and especially now – reveres youth.

My mother had a saying: ‚Kamala, you may be the first to do many things, but make sure you’re not the last.‘

Some believe all that parents, tutors, and kindred believe. They take their principles by inheritance, and defend them as they would their estates, because they are born heirs to them.

Bad news isn’t wine. It doesn’t improve with age.

My roots are in Paris, and I will not pull them up.

When I went back to England after a year away, the country seemed stuck, dozing in a fairy tale, stifled by the weight of tradition.

I don’t travel with them, but they can’t be missing in my home. There have to always be dominoes… I used to play with my family – dad, my grandpa, my uncles.

I used to carry my father’s Bible and put it on the pulpit so he could preach.

One aim of the Boy Scouts scheme is to revive amongst us, if possible, some of the rules of the knights of old.

The ideal death, I think, is what was the ideal Victorian death, you know, with your grandchildren around you, a bit of sobbing. And you say goodbye to your loved ones, making certain that one of them has been left behind to look after the shop.

I love Velveeta cheese.

He had a massive stroke. He died with his tie on. Do you think that could be our generation’s equivalent of that old saying about dying with your boots on?

I was baptized by my father when I was 4 years old.

All great peoples are conservative.

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

In a long meter hymn, a singer – they call it ‚lays out a line.‘ And then the whole church joins in in repeating that line. And they form a wall of harmony so tight, you can’t wedge a pin between it.

My grandmother took me to church on Sunday all day long, every Sunday into the night. Then Monday evening was the missionary meeting. Tuesday evening was usher board meeting. Wednesday evening was prayer meeting. Thursday evening was visit the sick. Friday evening was choir practice. I mean, and at all those gatherings, we sang.

Doubt in my tradition is something that is very helpful. Because of doubt, you can thirst more and you will get a higher kind of proof.

You’re never going to kill storytelling, because it’s built into the human plan. We come with it.

It is really very important while you are young to live in an environment in which there is no fear. Most of us, as we grow older, become frightened; we are afraid of living, afraid of losing a job, afraid of tradition, afraid of what the neighbours, or what the wife or husband would say, afraid of death.

I’m the proof – you can’t throw away tradition.

In our home there was always prayer – aloud, proud and unapologetic.

You might say that Lyndon Johnson is a cross between a Baptist preacher and a cowboy.

The colored folks been singing it and playing it just like I’m doin‘ now, man, for more years than I know. I got it from them.

The tradition of the South is not urban… I think we are a region of storytellers, naturally, just from our tribal instincts. We did not have the pleasures of the theater or the dance, motion pictures when they came along. We simply entertain each other by talking.

Part of my ancestry is Cherokee. And in that tradition, you become an adult when you’re 52.

Tea to the English is really a picnic indoors.

In this constant battle which we call living, we try to set a code of conduct according to the society in which we are brought up, whether it be a Communist society or a so-called free society; we accept a standard of behaviour as part of our tradition as Hindus or Muslims or Christians or whatever we happen to be.

Hunger is the best pickle.

A word to the wise is infuriating.

I truly believe the things Notre Dame stands for.

Once you get a spice in your home, you have it forever. Women never throw out spices. The Egyptians were buried with their spices. I know which one I’m taking with me when I go.

A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.

It is a common saying, and in everybody’s mouth, that life is but a sojourn.