Old ways will always remain unless some one invents a new way and then lives and dies for it.

To rest upon a formula is a slumber that, prolonged, means death.

A tradition without intelligence is not worth having.

A precedent embalms a principle.

My hope is that tradition should be the sap of progress.

Some people imagine that by returning to tradition, you will renew it. This is not true, for by returning to tradition, you renew nothing. But by setting out from it and adding to it, you renew its power, because only by addition can you prepare the future path for the living sap within it.

For tradition to be alive it has to be allowed to be a fountain of power for things undreamt of, things to come.

Sometimes tradition is a way of keeping going.

(Tradition) is the democracy of the dead.

Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.

No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof.

Tradition, thou art for suckling children, Thou art the enlivening milk for babes, But no meat for men is in thee.

A love for tradition has never weakened a nation, indeed it has strengthened nations in their hour of peril; but the new view must come, the world must roll forward.

Hardened round us, encasing wholly every notion we form, is a wrappage of traditions, hearsays, mere words.

They that reverence too much old times are but a scorn to the new.

I am the East. I have philosophies, I have religions, who would exchange them for airplanes?

The dead govern the living.

We must accept all the implications of our human inheritance, one of the most important of which is the small scope of biologically transmitted behavior, and the enormous role of the cultural process of the transmission of tradition.

It is pure illusion to think that an opinion which passes down from century to century, from generation to generation, may not be entirely false.

There is no creation without tradition. No one creates from nothing.