Remove not the ancient landmarks the fathers have set. Everywhere men have made the way for us with sweat and submission. We may fling ourselves into a hammock in a fit of divine carelessness. But we are glad that the netmaker did not make the hammock in a fit of divine carelessness. We cannot know where we are, much less where we are going, until we know where we have been.
Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of classes, our ancestors.
It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking around. Reflect on these things, and you will see that, however vociferously men may declare their attachment to other ideologies, in their most solemn and silent innervations they are naturally conservative. Custom reconciles us to everything.