Customs Quotes - Page 16

• Only if you have some knowledge of the human sacrifices, the vicious temple rites, the degrading superstitions and customs that were practiced . . . can you realize how much the modern world owes to the Hebrew prophets, whose monotheism and moral teachings entered into Christianity and Islam.

  Carlton J. H. Hayes

  Teaching, Sacrifice, Islam

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• Look, we're Americans: optimistic, addicted to the quick fix, constantly on the hunt for the new and exotic. It's much easier for us to accept a guy with a big white beard hawking his own custom blend of saw palmetto and squirrel dandruff that it is to hear a real doctor telling us to lay off the big macs, and get off our fat asses and take a walk every decade or so.

  Dennis Miller

  Real, Optimistic, White

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• I'm only stopped by people in uniform, whether it's customs people, janitors, or the FBI - they all watch The Wire. Sadly, beautiful, glamorous women don't know anything about it.

  Dominic West

  Beautiful, People, Wire

  "Down to The Wire with Dominic West". Interview with Sara Bliss, www.esquire.com. December 31, 2006.

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• I just wish this social institution [religion] wasnt based on what appears to me to be a monumental hoax built on an accumulation of customs and myths directed toward proving something that isnt true.

  Andy Rooney

  Atheist, Wish, Hoaxes

  Andy Rooney (2009). “Sincerely, Andy Rooney”, p.226, Hachette UK

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• Policemen and laws can never replace customs, traditions and moral values as a means for regulating human behavior. At best, the police and criminal justice system are the last desperate line of defense for a civilized society. Our increased reliance on laws to regulate behavior is a measure of how uncivilized we’ve become.

  D. Todd Christofferson

  Mean, Law, Justice

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• It is not how we breed, keep and kill animals for human consumption that has been the impetus for vegetarianism for thousands of years. It is that we breed, keep and kill animals for human consumption. Throughout the centuries the common thread in the arguments against eating animals is the fact that since we have no nutritional requirement for the flesh or fluids of animals, killing them to simply satisfy our taste-buds or habits or customs amounts to senseless slaughter, and senseless slaughter is no small thing.

  Colleen Patrick-Goudreau

  Animal, Vegetarianism, Years

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• By journalistic custom and D.C. law, of course, reporters don't carry guns to news conferences -- and certainly not when the person at the lectern is the NRA's Asa Hutchinson, an unremarkable former congressman and Bush administration official whom most reporters couldn't pick out of a lineup. But the NRA wasn't going to leave any doubt about its superior firepower.

  Dana Milbank

  Gun, Law, Doubt

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• It is not your right—based on YOUR traditions, YOUR customs and YOUR habits—to deny animals THEIR freedom so you can harm them, enslave them and kill them. Thats not what rights are about. Thats injustice. There is no counter-argument to veganism. Accept it. Apologize for the way youve been living. Make amends and move forward.

  Gary Yourofsky

  Moving, Animal, Rights

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• American soldiers [are] going into the homes of Iraqis in the dead of night, terrorizing kids and children, you know, women, breaking sort of the customs of the ñ of ñ the historical customs, religious customs.

  John F. Kerry

  Religious, Children, Home

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• Thus far women have been the mere echoes of men. Our laws and constitutions, our creeds and codes, and the customs of social life are all of masculine origin. The true woman is as yet a dream of the future. A just government, a humane religion, a pure social life await her coming.

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton

  Dream, Men, Law

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan Brownell Anthony, Ida Husted Harper, Matilda Joslyn Gage (1902). “History of Woman Suffrage ...: 1883-1900”

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• I have myself, for many years, made it a practice to read through the Bible once ever year.... My custom is, to read four to five chapters every morning immediately after rising from my bed. I employs about an hour of my time.

  John Quincy Adams

  Morning, Years, Practice

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• Seamen have a custom, when they meet a whale, to fling him out an empty tub by way of amusement, to divert him from laying violent hands upon the ship.

  Jonathan Swift

  Hands, Whales, Amusement

  Jonathan Swift, William Wotton (1811). “A tale of a tub,: written for the universal improvement of mankind. To which is added, An account of a battle between the ancient and modern books in St. James's Library”, p.43

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• Also in contemporary Western society the union with the group is the prevalent way of overcoming separateness. It is a union which the individual self disappears to a large extent, and where the aim is to belong to the heard. If I am like everybody else, if I have no feeling or thoughts which make me different, if I conform in custom, dress, ideas, to the pattern of the group, I am saved: saved from the frightening experience of aloneness.

  Erich Fromm

  Self, Ideas, Feelings

  ERICH FROMM (1956). “THE ART OF LOVING”

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• Sin is cruelty and injustice, all else is peccadillo. Oh, a sense of sin comes from violating the customs of your tribe. But breaking custom is not sin even when it feels so; sin is wronging another person.

  Robert A. Heinlein

  Tribes, Injustice, Sin

  Robert A. Heinlein (2007). “Glory Road”, p.144, Macmillan

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• No one in my family had ever attended school [...] On the first day of school my teacher, Miss Mdingane, gave each of us an English name. This was the custom among Africans in those days and was undoubtedly due to the British bias of our education. That day, Miss Mdingane told me that my new name was Nelson. Why this particular name I have no idea.

  Nelson Mandela

  Teacher, School, Names

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• It has been generally the custom of writers on natural history to take the habits and instincts of animals as the fixed point, and to consider their structure and organization as specially adapted to be in accordance with them.

  Alfred Russel Wallace

  Animal, Organization, Habit

  Alfred Russel Wallace (1869). “The Malay Archipelago: The Land of the Orang-utan and the Bird of Paradise”, p.267, London, Macmillan

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• We who have been born and nurtured on this soil, we, whose habits, manners, and customs are the same in common with other Americans, can never consent to - be the bearers of the redress offered by that Society to that much afflicted.

  Richard V. Allen

  Soil, Common, Habit

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• For most of recorded history, parental violence against children and men's violence against wives was explicitly or implicitly condoned. Those who had the power to prevent and/or punish this violence through religion, law, or custom, openly or tacitly approved it. .....The reason violence against women and children is finally out in the open is that activists have brought it to global attention.

  Riane Eisler

  Children, Women, Law

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• We must not make a scarecrow of the law, Setting it up to fear the birds of prey, And let it keep one shape till custom make it Their perch, and not their terror.

  William Shakespeare

  Law, Bird, Shapes

  'Measure for Measure' (1604) act 2, sc. 1, l. 1

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• You perceive I generalize with intrepidity from single instances. It is the tourist's custom.

  Mark Twain

  Travel, Society, Tourism

  Mark Twain (1976). “Mark Twain's Notebooks & Journals, Volume II: (1877-1883)”, p.318, Univ of California Press

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• Often a quite assified remark becomes sanctified by use and petrified by custom; it is then a permanency, its term of activity a geologic period.

  Mark Twain

  Use, Periods, Term

  Mark Twain, Caroline Thomas Harnsberger (2009). “Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations”, p.403, Courier Corporation

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• Innumerable are the illusions and legerdemain-tricks of custom: but of all of these, perhaps the cleverest is her knack of persuading us that the miraculous, by simple repetition, ceases to be miraculous.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Simple, Knack, Illusion

  Thomas Carlyle (1871). “Works”, p.179

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• I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to the number of which they are themselves adding?joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid leaves with disgust.

  Jane Austen

  Numbers, Enemy, Joining

  Jane Austen (2005). “The Complete Novels of Jane Austen”, p.1089, Wordsworth Editions

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• The universality of a custom is pledge of its worth.

  Agnes Repplier

  Universality, Pledge

  Agnes Repplier (1904). “Compromises”

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• There is the grand truth about Nathaniel Hawthorne. He says NO! in thunder; but the Devil himself cannot make him say yes. For all men who say yes, lie; and all men who say no,why, they are in the happy condition of judicious, unincumbered travellers in Europe; they cross the frontiers into Eternity with nothing but a carpet-bag,that is to say, the Ego. Whereas those yes-gentry, they travel with heaps of baggage, and, damn them! they will never get through the Custom House.

  Herman Melville

  Lying, Men, Europe

  Herman Melville, Lynn Horth (1993). “Correspondence”, p.186, Northwestern University Press

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