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A diplomat of full age ought surely to know this pair of simple things!
that a country's laws are written upon paper, and that its customs are
engraved upon brass. One may play with the one, but not with the other.
It is less risky for a stranger to dance upon our Constitution in the
public square than to affront one of our solidified customs. The one is
merely eminently respectable, the other is sacred. Gorky made an awful mistake, Dan. He might as well have come over here
in his shirt-tail. |
 Maxim Gorky and Mme. Andreyeva created a scandal when they visited New York together in 1906. |
Customs do not concern themselves with right or wrong or reason. But they have
to be obeyed; one reasons all around them until he is tired, but he must not
transgress them, it is sternly forbidden.
- "The Gorky Incident"
Laws are sand, customs are rock. Laws can be evaded and punishment escaped,
but an openly transgressed custom brings sure punishment. The penalty may be
unfair, unrighteous, illogical, and a cruelty; no matter, it will be inflicted,
just the same. Certainly, then, there can be but one wise thing for a visiting
stranger to do--find out what the country's customs are, and refrain from offending
against them.
- "The Gorky Incident"
Customs do not concern themselves with right or wrong or reason.
- "The Gorky Incident"
Custom is petrification; nothing but dynamite can dislodge it for a century.
-"Diplomatic Pay and Clothes"
There isn't anything you can't stand, if you are only born and bred to it.
- A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
Often the less there is to justify a traditional custom the harder it is to
get rid it.
- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Custom is custom: it is built of brass, boiler-iron, granite; facts, reasonings,
arguments have no more effect upon it than the idle winds have upon Gibraltar.
- Mark Twain, a Biography
A crime persevered in a thousand centuries ceases to be a crime, and becomes
a virtue. This is the law of custom, and custom supersedes all other forms of
law.
- Following the Equator
Have a place for everything and keep the thing somewhere else; this is not
advice, it is merely custom.
- Notebook, 1898
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