Culture and Tradition

John Synge, I and Augusta Gregory, thought All that we did, all that we said or sang Must come from contact with the soil, from that Contact everything Antaeus-like grew strong.

A crime persevered in a thousand centuries ceases to be a crime, and becomes a virtue. This is the law of custom, and custom supersedes all other forms of law.

If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilized morality to savage morality.

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them. They must, they have no other models.

I have never understood why anybody agreed to go on being a rustic after about 1400.

Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.

 

It is not that the Englishman can't feel—it is that he is afraid to feel. He has been taught at his public school that feeling is bad form. He must not express great joy or sorrow, or even open his mouth too wide when he talks—his pipe might fall out if he did.

Old maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn mornings … these are not only fragments, but characteristic fragments, of the English scene.

Americans are nature-lovers: but they only admit of nature proofed and corrected by man.

Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts—the book of their deeds, the book of their words, and the book of their art.

The old game, I suspect, is beginning to play out, even in the Bible Belt.

It is revolting to have no better reason for a rule of law than that so it was laid down in the time of Henry IV. It is still more revolting if the grounds upon which it was laid down have vanished long since, and the rule simply persists from blind imitation of the past.

 

Modern English is the Wal-Mart of languages: convenient, huge, hard to avoid, superficially friendly, and devouring all rivals in its eagerness to expand.

The clatter of clogs in the Lancashire mill towns, the to-and-fro of the lorries on the Great North Road, the queues outside the Labour Exchanges, the rattle of pin-tables in the Soho pubs, the old maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn mornings—all these are not only fragments, but characteristic fragments, of the English scene.

Truth is a gem that is found at a great depth; whilst on the surface of this world, all things are weighed by the false scale of custom.

It is from Italy that we launch through the world this violently upsetting incendiary manifesto of ours. With it, today, we establish Futurism , because we want to free this land from its smelly gangrene of professors, archaeologists, ciceroni , and antiquarians. For too long Italy has been a dealer in secondhand clothes. We mean to free her from the numberless museums that cover her like so many graveyards.

Each religion, so dear to those whose life it sanctifies, and fulfilling so necessary a function in the society that has adopted it, necessarily contradicts every other religion, and probably contradicts itself.

The people like neither the true nor the simple; they like novels and charlatans.

It is a very curious fact that, with all our boasted “free and equal superiority over the communities of the Old World, our people [Americans] have the most enormous appetite for Old World titles of distinction.

He’s an Anglo-Saxon Messenger—and those are Anglo-Saxon attitudes.

The glory that was Greece

Mrs Ballinger is one of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous to meet it alone.

Our inheritance of well founded, slowly conceived codes of honor, morals and manners, the passionate convictions which so many hundreds of millions share together of freedom and justice, are far more precious to us than anything which scientific discoveries can bestow.

If you invest all your energy in economics, world commerce, parliamentarianism, military engagements, power and power politics, -if you take the quantum of intelligence, seriousness, will, and self-overcoming that you embody and expend it all in this one direction, there there won't be any left for the other direction. Culture and the state - let us be honest with ourselves - these are adversaries.