You should not be allowed to remove a rule or a tradition unless and until you fully understand the reasons why it was first put in place, and all the effects that its presence has

There was once a man who had a long way to walk to work, and every day he had to go well out of his way because a large hedge blocked the most direct route. Every day he walked over a mile further in the morning, and again on his way home in the evening because the hedge was in his way. Day after day, he looked at the hedge and thought, If that hedge wasn’t there, I could save myself an hour of walking every day. Eventually he had had enough and decided to make a hole in the hedge so that he could walk the shorter route and save himself time. And that was the day that the bull who lived on the other side of the hedge killed him. Chesterton used the story to illustrate his principle that you should not be allowed to remove a rule or a tradition unless and until you fully understand the reasons why it was first put in place, and all the effects that its presence has.

N. Leamon & B. Jones, Hitting Against the Spin: How Cricket Really Works (2021), loc.159

Freddie herself had fulfilled the one sure condition of being loved by the English nation, that is, she had been going on a very long time

Freddie had no need to depend upon her friends in the theatre. Neither did she have to dread time’s encroachments. The place could hardly get any shabbier, and Freddie herself had fulfilled the one sure condition of being loved by the English nation, that is, she had been going on a very long time. She had done so much for Shakespeare, one institution, it seemed, befriending another. Her ruffianly behaviour had become ‘known eccentricities’. Like Buckingham Palace, Lyons teashops, the British Museum Reading Room, or the market at Covent Garden, she could never be allowed to disappear. While England rested true to itself, she need never compromise.

P. Fitzgerald, At Freddie’s (1982), 53

[Burke]

[The state] becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are yet to be born. Each contract of the particular state is but a clause in the great primaeval contract of eternal society.

Individuals were tenants, not freeholders, of the political communities into which they had been born, by which they had been shaped and into which their descendants would be born in turn. From that insight sprang an ethic of stewardship, closer to today's Greens than to any conventional political party, and utterly at variance with the Trinity of Choice, Freedom and the Individual.

D. Marquand, Mammon's Kingdom (2014), 199

I obviously agree with the author's and commentator's lines here. I find the identification of this approach with the Greens alone preposterous.