Francis Bacon - Soren Kierkegaard - Daniel C Dennett - Richard Dawkins TV - Igor Stravinsky - G K Chesterton - Woody Allen - Warren Ellis - Winston Churchill - T S Eliot -
You have to break technique. Break tradition to do something really new. You always go back into Tradition. But you have to break it. And reinvent it first. Francis Bacon, cited The Art of Francis Bacon
Marriage brings one into fatal connection with custom and tradition, and traditions and customs are like the wind and weather, altogether incalculable. Soren Kierkegaard
Those who feel guilty contemplating ‘betraying’ the tradition they love by acknowledging their disapproval of elements within it should reflect on the fact that the very tradition to which they are so loyal – the ‘eternal’ tradition introduced to them in their youth – is in fact the evolved product of many adjustments firmly but delicately made by earlier lovers of the same tradition. Daniel C Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon
It was handed down over centuries. And the odd thing about tradition is that the longer it’s been going the more people seem to take it seriously. It is as though sheer passage of time makes something that was to begin with just made up, turns it into something people believe as fact. Richard Dawkins, The Root of All Evil? The God Delusion, Channel 4 2006
Tradition is entirely different from habit, even from an excellent habit, since habit is by definition an unconscious acquisition and tends to become mechanical, whereas tradition results from a conscious and deliberate acceptance ... Tradition presupposes the reality of what endures. Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music, 1947
Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. G K Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 1908
Tradition is the illusion of permanence. Woody Allen
Tradition: one of those words conservative people use as a shortcut to thinking. Warren Ellis, Transmetropolitan, Vol. 4: The New Scum
A love for tradition has never weakened a nation, indeed it has strengthened nations in their hour of peril. Winston Churchill
A tradition without intelligence is not worth having. T S Eliot