Desert Archaic People

Famous quotes containing the words desert, archaic and/or people:

    Blame but thyself that hast misdone,
    And well deserved to have blame;
    Change thou thy way so evil begun,
    And then my lute shall sound that same:
    But if till then my fingers play
    By thy desert their wonted way,
    Blame not my lute.
    Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503?–1542)

    Almost always tradition is nothing but a record and a machine-made imitation of the habits that our ancestors created. The average conservative is a slave to the most incidental and trivial part of his forefathers’ glory—to the archaic formula which happened to express their genius or the eighteenth-century contrivance by which for a time it was served.
    Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)

    Among the virtues and vices that make up the British character, we have one vice, at least, that Americans ought to view with sympathy. For they appear to be the only people who share it with us. I mean our worship of the antique. I do not refer to beauty or even historical association. I refer to age, to a quantity of years.
    William Golding (b. 1911)