quotations about custom
Custom will reconcile people to any atrocity; and fashion will drive them to acquire any custom.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
preface, Killing For Sport
Custom will often blind one to the good, as well as to the evil effects of any long-established system.
RICHARD WHATELY
Essays
The customs of the world are so many conventional follies.
EDGAR ALLAN POE
"The Spectacles"
Custom meets us at the cradle and leaves us only at the tomb.
ROBERT G. INGERSOLL
Individuality
Cast away the bondage and the fear of rotten custom.
HARTLEY COLERIDGE
Sonnets
Custom is the first check on tyranny; that fixed routine of social life at which modern innovations chafe, and by which modern improvement is impeded, is the primitive check on base power.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Literary Studies
Habit or custom, like a complex mathematical scheme, flows from a point, insensibly becomes a line, and unhappily in that which is evil, it may become a curve.
R. ROBINSON
attributed, Laconics
When Fashion hath once Established, what Folly or craft began, Custom makes it Sacred, and 'twill be thought impudence or madness, to contradict or question it.
JOHN LOCKE
First Treatise of Government
The constant pressure of custom; the effects of imitation, of education, and of habit; the incalculable influence of man on man, produce a working uniformity of conviction more effectually than the gallows and the stake, though without the cruelty, and with far more than the wisdom that have usually been vouchsafed to official persecutors.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Essays and Addresses
Just because you have become accustomed to a thing, does not make it right.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON
Dune: House Atreides
How many unjust and wicked things are sanctioned by custom.
TERENCE
attributed, Day's Collacon
Custom may lead a man into many errors; but it justifies none.
HENRY FIELDING
The Wedding-Day
My normal isn't your normal, and your normal isn't anyone else's normal. In fact, on this journey called life, normal isn't normal.
TYEISHA BREWER-FIELDS
Normal By Whose Standards?
Those who live not by law would be justified by Custom: but, as common practice is the worst teacher that ever was, so the truth and goodness of things is not to be estimated by the entertainment and acceptance they find in the world.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE
Moral and Religious Aphorisms
For the customs of the peoples are delusion;
Because it is wood cut from the forest,
The work of the hands of a craftsman with a cutting tool.
They decorate it with silver and with gold;
They fasten it with nails and with hammers
So that it will not totter.
Like a scarecrow in a cucumber field are they,
And they cannot speak;
They must be carried,
Because they cannot walk!
Do not fear them,
For they can do no harm,
Nor can they do any good.
BIBLE
Jeremiah 10:3-5
Custom, though never so ancient, without truth, is but an old error.
CYPRIAN
attributed, Day's Collacon
Custom calls me to 't:
What custom wills, in all things should we do't,
The dust on antique time would lie unswept,
And mountainous error be too highly heap't
For truth to o'erpeer.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Coriolanus
When a custom is actually proved to exist, the next enquiry is into the legality of it; for if it is not a good custom it ought to be no longer used.
WILLIAM BLACKSTONE
Commentaries on the Laws of England
I cannot draw a distinction as to what length of time will render a practice legal.
C. J. DALLAS
Butt v. Conant, 1828
Woe unto you, O torrent of human custom! Who shall stay your course? When will you ever run dry? How long will you carry down the sons of Eve into that vast and hideous ocean.
AUGUSTINE
Confessions