Very little of the great cruelty shown by men can really be attributed to cruel instinct. Most of it comes from thoughtlessness or inherited habit. The roots of cruelty, therefore, are not so much strong as widespread. But the time must come when inhumanity protected by custom and thoughtlessness will succumb before humanity championed by thought. Let us work that this time may come.
When strangers meet, great allowance should be made for differences of custom and training.
I reverently believe that the maker who made us all makes everything in New England, but the weather. I don't know who makes that, but I think it must be raw apprentices in the weather-clerks factory who experiment and learn how, in New England, for board and clothes, and then are promoted to make weather for countries that require a good article, and will take their custom elsewhere if they don't get it.
A people among whom custom is altogether sovereign endures the despotism of the dead.
At UCLA I quickly learned the knack of getting grades, a craven surrender to custom, since grades had little to do with learning.
Custom makes monsters of us all.
Schools are no longer legally segregated, but because of residential patterns, housing discrimination, economic disparities and long-held custom, they most emphatically are in reality.
He who does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice.
But learn this custom from the flower: silence your tongue.
Those that will combat use and custom by the strict rules of grammar do but jest
According to the law of custom, and perhaps of reason, foreign travel completes the education of an English gentleman.
Custom is our nature. What are our natural principles but principles of custom?
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.
There is nothing so extreme that is not allowed by the custom of some nation or other.
How many things both just and unjust are sanctioned by custom?
Custom is the great leveller. It corrects the inequality of fortune by lessening equally the pleasures of the prince and the pains of the peasant.
A man who's active and incisive can yet keep nail-care much in mind: why fight what's known to be decisive? custom is despot of mankind.
The way of the world is to make laws, but follow custom.
Morality is the custom of one's country and the current feeling of one's peers.
No written law has ever been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.