I have spent every New Year’s Eve since 1992 in Lourdes. I spend the hour of my birth every year in the grotto. It’s a place with meaning for me.

If you have fear, you are bound by tradition, you follow some leader or guru. When you are bound by tradition, when you are afraid of your husband or your wife, you lose your dignity as an individual human being.

Food is everything we are. It’s an extension of nationalist feeling, ethnic feeling, your personal history, your province, your region, your tribe, your grandma. It’s inseparable from those from the get-go.

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

Tea to the English is really a picnic indoors.

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

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.

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

All great peoples are conservative.

For the introduction of a new kind of music must be shunned as imperiling the whole state; since styles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most important political institutions.

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

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

I was at a New Year’s Eve party, and someone asked me how was my year, and I said, ‚I honestly think 2011 was the best year of my entire life,‘ and I actually meant it.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.‘

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

Free institutions certainly exist, but a tradition of passivity and conformism restricts their use – a cynic might say that this is why they continue to exist.

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

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.

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

I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year.

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.

Ritual will always mean throwing away something: destroying our corn or wine upon the altar of our gods.

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.

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.

It is the duty of every thoughtful Indian not to marry. In case he is helpless in regard to marriage, he should abstain from sexual intercourse with his wife.

A lot of churches have not moved with the times.

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.

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

Don’t bother about being modern. Unfortunately it is the one thing that, whatever you do, you cannot avoid.

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

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

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

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

Puerto Rico’s relationship with music is everything. It’s an island full of talent and if you grow up there, you grow up living and breathing music.

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’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.

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.

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.

When you learn about the teaching and the practice of another tradition, you always have a chance to understand your own teaching and practice.

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.

Tradition becomes our security, and when the mind is secure it is in decay.

In the West, we have been withdrawing from our tradition-, religion-, and even nation-centred cultures.

I truly believe the things Notre Dame stands for.

I hate the rock music tradition. I can’t bear it!

Tradition is the illusion of permanence.

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.

Be not the first by whom the new are tried, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.

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

Many Tibetans sacrifice their lives.

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.

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

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.

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.

Get off your horse and drink your milk.

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

When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence.