#custom

Why do you need that thing?" September asked. "None of the airports back home have them." "They do. You just can't see them right," Betsy Basilstalk said with a grin. "All customs agents have them, otherwise, why would people agree to stand in line and be peered at and inspected? We all live inside the terrible engine of authority, and it grinds and shrieks and burns so that no one will say, lines on maps are silly. Where you live, the awful machinery is smaller, harder to see. Less honest, that's all. Whereas Rupert here? He's as honest as they come. Does what it says on the box. ↗

— Catherynne M. Valente

#customs #obedience #travel #truth-telling #home

Curiously, among the few survivors from this culinary onslaught is one that is most difficult to understand: the fish knife. Though it remains the standard instrument for dealing with fish of all kinds, no one has ever identified a single advantage conferred by its odd scalloped shape or worked out the original thinking behind it. There isn't a single kind of fish that it cuts better or bones more delicately than a conventional knife does. ↗

— Bill Bryson

#dining #ettiquette #silverware #home

If we take care of the customers and associates and grow the business, Wall Street will be pleased. ↗

— Lee Scott

#business #care #customers #grow #pleased

I don't like customer service, because I don't believe the customer should have to pay and help out too. ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#customer-service #love #ridiculous #work #love

Custom reconciles us to everything. ↗

— Edmund Burke

#everything #reconciles #us

Customs tell a man who he is, where he belongs, what he must do. Better illogical customs than none; men cannot live together without them. ↗

— Robert A. Heinlein

#men

Most men live like raisins in a cake of custom. ↗

— Brand Blanshard

#men

Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil. My children have had other birthplaces, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth. ↗

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

#nature

We naturally like what we have been accustomed to, and are attracted towards it. [...] The same is the case with those opinions of man to which he has been accustomed from his youth; he likes them, defends them, and shuns the opposite views. ↗

— Maimonides

#habit #ideas #opinions #thought #views

Habits and customs are a convenience devised for the support of timid natures who dare not allow their souls free play. ↗

— Virginia Woolf

#habit #nature