“If one should bid all people select the best customs in the world, each race, after examining them all, would select those of its own.”
Herodotus, c. 430 BC · Greek writer, the first historian
Chapter 6
On Changing Customs
“Of all things, law is king.”
Pindar, c. 450 BC · Greek poet, quoted by Herodotus
“That which hath been is now; and that which is to be hath already been.”
Ecclesiastes, c. 250 BC · the Preacher, Hebrew wisdom literature
“He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils; for time is the greatest innovator.”
Francis Bacon, 1625 · English essayist and Lord Chancellor
“What is settled by custom, though it be not good, yet at least it is fit.”
Francis Bacon, 1625 · English essayist and Lord Chancellor
“Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. For every thing that is given something is taken. Society acquires new arts and loses old instincts.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1841 · American essayist
“As the waves of the great river drive on those before them, so in the world new people take the old people's places.”
Chinese proverb, 1875 · collected in north China in the nineteenth century
“We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and to the future.”
Frederick Douglass, 1852 · American abolitionist and orator
UNESCO counts roughly half of the world's 7,000 languages as endangered. A language dies when the generation that speaks it stops handing it to the one that follows.
UNESCO, 2022 · International Decade of Indigenous Languages, 2022-2032
A 35-year study of the same families found that what passes down is not doctrine but warmth. Where the older generation was close and affirming, the young kept the tradition. Where it was rigid, they left.
Vern Bengtson, Norella Putney and Susan Harris, 2013 · Longitudinal Study of Generations, University of Southern California
Free to read, always. Liking a verse or leaving a comment happens in the app, so the conversation has a name attached to it.