I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh: it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God's feet, equal--as we are!
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 andor 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.
The laws of conscience, though we ascribe them to nature, actually come from custom.
The custom of burning a beneficent god is too foreign to later modes of thought to escape misinterpretation.
The husbandman is always a better Greek than the scholar is prepared to appreciate, and the old custom still survives, while antiquarians and scholars grow gray in commemorating it.
The security of Society lies in custom and unconscious instinct, and the basis of the stability of Society, as a healthy organism, is the complete absence of any intelligence amongst its members.
In the old patrician world there was a custom once a week you had to eat a meal with your slaves and get to know them as people.
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.
The custom of sinning takes away the sense of it, the course of the world takes away the shame of it.
Roughly speaking, the President of the United States knows what his job is. Constitution and custom spell it out, for him as well as for us. His wife has no such luck. The First Lady has no rules; rather each new woman must make her own.
Those that will combat use and custom by the strict rules of grammar do but jest
All inferences from experience. . . are effects of custom, not of reasoning.
This is why God created so many different religions: to be training grounds to make a path for every people, culture, custom, and tradition. Religions polish people to be qualified to enter the region of the original homeland. Because of humankind's many different cultural backgrounds, God sought and set the standard of comparison and has been leading the way toward one unified religious world.
We compromise ourselves the day we are born. If we are looking for the original sin, there it is- our incapacity to live honestly with ourselves because we are human, because we are shackled by custom, by obligations and we accept compromise only in the light of our conscience, answerable as we are only to ourselves.
If custom is to avail for proof of soundness, we too, surely, may advance our prevailing custom; and if they reject this, we are surely not bound to follow theirs. Let the inspired Scripture, then, be our umpire, and the vote of truth will surely be given to those whose dogmas are found to agree with the Divine words.
By liberty I mean the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes to be his duty against the influences of authority and majorities, custom and opinion.
Custom is almost a second nature.
That wild beast which lives in man and does not dare to show itself until the barriers of law and custom have been removed, was now set free.
Christmas is a glorious time of the year, simple in origin, deep in meaning, beautiful in tradition and custom, rich in memories, and charitable in spirit.
The breach of custom Is breach of all.
