Culture and Tradition

In order that there may be institutions, there must be a kind of will, instinct, or imperative, which is anti-liberal to the point of malice: the will to tradition, to authority, to responsibility for centuries to come, to the solidarity of chains of generations, forward and backward ad infinitum.

What does our great historical hunger signify, our clutching about us of countless cultures, our consuming desire for knowledge, if not the loss of myth, of a mythic home, the mythic womb?

The good men of every age are those who go to the roots of the old thoughts and bear fruit with them.

Every culture that has lost myth has lost, by the same token, its natural healthy creativity. Only a horizon ringed about with myths can unify a culture. The forces of imagination and the Apollonian dream are saved only by myth from indiscriminate rambling. The images of myth must be the daemonic guardians, ubiquitous but unnoticed, presiding over the growth of the child's mind and interpreting to the mature man his life and struggles.

The power of gradually losing all feeling of strangeness or astonishment, and finally being pleased at anything, is called the historical sense or historical culture.

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.

The conviction reigns that it is only through the sacrifices and accomplishments of the ancestors that the tribe exists--and that one has to pay them back with sacrifices and accomplishments; one thus recognizes a debt that constantly grows greater, since these forebears never cease, in their continued existence as powerful spirits, to accord the tribe new advantages and new strength.

love as a passion—it is our European specialty—must absolutely be of noble origin; as is well known, its invention is due to the Provencal poet-cavaliers, those brilliant, ingenious men of the "gai saber," to whom Europe owes so much, and almost owes itself.

In some families, please is described as the magic word. In our house, however, it was sorry.

It was the same with those old birds in Greece and Rome as it is now. The only thing new in the world is the history you don’t know.

Man creates culture and through culture creates himself.

You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

What you have inherited from your fathers, earn over again for yourselves, or it will not be yours.

Those who tell the stories rule society.

Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone believed, by the masses.

Life must be lived as play, playing certain games, making sacrifices, singing and dancing, and then a man will be able to propitiate the gods, and defend himself against his enemies, and win in the contest.

Every king springs from a race of slaves, and every slave had kings among his ancestors.

Revolution is not the uprising against pre-existing order, but the setting-up of a new order contradictory to the traditional one.

To satisfy their hunger for meaning and value, they [the masses] turn to such doctrines as nationalism, fascism and revolutionary communism. Philosophically and scientifically, these doctrines are absurd; but for the masses in every community, they have this great merit: they attribute the meaning and value that have been taken away from the world as a whole to the particular part of the world in which the believers happen to be living.

The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’ . . . In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning.

The interaction of disparate cultures, the vehemence of the ideals that led the immigrants here, the opportunity offered by a new life, all gave America a flavor and a character that make it as unmistakable and as remarkable to people today as it was to Alexis de Tocqueville in the early part of the nineteenth century.

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

Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.

Astronomy was born of superstition; eloquence of ambition, hatred, falsehood, and flattery; geometry of avarice; physics of an idle curiosity; and even moral philosophy of human pride. Thus the arts and sciences owe their birth to our vices.