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.
G.K. Chesterton in Orthodoxy
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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.
quote by Gilbert K. Chesterton
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When they talk about family values, it's in a repressive way, as if our American tradition were only the Puritan tradition or the 19th century oppressive tradition. The Christian tradition.
quote by James Hillman
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As soon as tradition has come to be recognized as tradition, it is dead.
quote by Allan Bloom
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The African Tradition
Libation! It is the African tradition;
It is the centre culture of our tradition;
The power of the African child,
The network of the information from the household gods
And the gods of kingdom, the gods of our identity.
We libate with schnapps, awake the spirits
Of our ancestors so speed us in action an' reaction
But done upon the gad at ease we no longer
For our centre culture active no more as things fell apart
But who is he that makes our minds troubled?
And walk we abroad and forgot our tradition,
Our culture, belief, our vehicle and our tradition
Woe to you foreigner for deception is you;
The betweeness between us took you away from us
And our offspring you turned rebels with your foreign ideas.
The networks of our wise ones you intercepted
And your strange God now we serve with you
While our wise ones slave for your topless.
No to you foreigner, for me, myself and I shall awake
And maintain my fathers' beliefs, culture and tradition
Which I have come and seen, for it is my true identity,
For I am a true African child.
poem by Lightcheerful Briggs
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Dear Lorca
Dear Lorca,
These letters are to be as temporary as our poetry is to be permanent. They will establish the bulk, the wastage that my sour-stomached contemporaries demand to help them swallow and digest the pure word. We will use up our rhetoric here so that it will not appear in our poems. Let it be consumed paragraph by paragraph, day by day, until nothing of it is left in our poetry and nothing of our poetry is left in it. It is precisely because these letters are unnecessary that they must be written.
In my last letter I spoke of the tradition. The fools that read these letters will think by this we mean what tradition seems to have meant lately—an historical patchwork (whether made up of Elizabethan quotations, guide books of the poet’s home town, or obscure bits of magic published by Pantheon) which is used to cover up the nakedness of the bare word. Tradition means much more than that. It means generations of different poets in different countries patiently telling the same story, writing the same poem, gaining and losing something with each transformation—but, of course, never really losing anything. This has nothing to do with calmness, classicism, temperament, or anything else. Invention is merely the enemy of poetry.
See how weak prose is. I invent a word like invention. These paragraphs could be translated, transformed by a chain of fifty poets in fifty languages, and they still would be temporary, untrue, unable to yield the substance of a single image. Prose invents—poetry discloses.
A mad man is talking to himself in the room next to mine. He speaks in prose. Presently I shall go to a bar and there one or two poets will speak to me and I to them and we will try to destroy each other or attract each other or even listen to each other and nothing will happen because we will be speaking in prose. I will go home, drunken and dissatisfied, and sleep—and my dreams will be prose. Even the subconscious is not patient enough for poetry.
You are dead and the dead are very patient.
Love,
Jack
poem by Jack Spicer
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And I am also here to say that if something were to happen, we are prepared to respond swiftly, to respond effectively, and to respond strongly. That is our tradition as a country. And that is a tradition that we will uphold, regardless of any circumstance because this nation is one that is very, very strong and, indeed, extraordinarily resilient.
quote by Janet Napolitano
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To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize "how it really was." It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger. For historical materialism it is a question of holding fast to a picture of the past, just as if it had unexpectedly thrust itself, in a moment of danger, on the historical subject. The danger threatens the stock of tradition as much as its recipients. For both it is one and the same: handing itself over as the tool of the ruling classes. In every epoch, the attempt must be made to deliver tradition anew from the conformism which is on the point of overwhelming it. For the Messiah arrives not merely as the Redeemer; he also arrives as the vanquisher of the Anti-christ. The only writer of history with the gift of setting alight the sparks of hope in the past, is the one who is convinced of this: that not even the dead will be safe from the enemy, if he is victorious. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.
quote by Walter Benjamin
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The epic poet has behind him a tradition of matter and a tradition of style; and that is what every other poet has behind him too; only, for the epic poet, tradition is rather narrower, rather more strictly compelling.
quote by Lascelles Abercrombie
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Mother-child rotation
Tradition breeds revolution
Revolution grows to tradition.
Tradition breeds revolution again.
They are like mother child rotation.
29.10.2007.
poem by Rm. Shanmugam Chettiar
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But if there's an erosion at home, you know, Thomas Jefferson warned about a tyranny of an oligarchy and if we surrender our democracy to the tyranny of an oligarchy, we've made a terrible mistake.
quote by Pat Robertson
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I like narrative storytelling as being part of a tradition, a folk tradition.
quote by Bruce Springsteen
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The tradition you have at the University of Texas is like no other. It helped me in the future where I got to play in 2 cities that were rich in tradition.
quote by Roger Clemens
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The tradition of Russian literature is also an eastern tradition of learning poetry and prose by heart.
quote by Ryszard Kapuscinski
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While no tradition coincides with experience, every tradition is essentially unique and valuable. While all traditions are of value, none is finally binding.
quote by Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan
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It's a fun day, a day which kicks off the start of our tour, it's got great tradition - Australian cricketers just love tradition - and it's been a really pleasant day.
quote by Matthew Hayden
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A Political Statement
i pray that corruption be murdered
let the culprits be free
i pray that dishonesty be hanged
let the judges rule
i pray for the the killing of tradition
let the love of money go hungry
i pray that the voices of the people be heard again
without any intervention
i pray that democracy shall bloom again
like a brand new day
i pray that the voices of conscience prevail
over the choking hands of money and fame
i pray for the death of tradition
for the triumph of innovation
poem by Ric S. Bastasa
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We still have a tradition certainly in English television; it's faded a bit in the last five years, but we still have a tradition where the important thing is the quality and the challenging nature of the programming.
quote by Rowan Atkinson
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An Old Tradition
An old tradition,
An old love;
Strap, trap, rap, tap, map, crap, cap, wrap, frap;
We brought nothing into this world and,
It is certain that we can carry nothing out!
But, food and clothing are needed in life,
And like your sensual desires.
An old tradition,
A person who lives for pleasure is dead while he or she still lives! !
But, i want to marry you my love;
So, keep yourself clean amd pure always,
And pay attention to yourself!
For, i am ever prepared for you.
poem by Edward Kofi Louis
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My true function within a society which embraces all of us is to continue an age-old tradition. This tradition is to create images from the depths of the imagination and to give them form, whether visual, intellectual or musical.
quote by Michael Tippett
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Tradition does not mean that the living are dead, it means that the dead are living.
quote by Harold MacMillan
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