Quotes About Convention

she says it's a tradition --- which must mean all those things people do that they don't know why they do 'em." from the novella Christopher O'Connor's Romances

The violent illiteracies of the graffiti, the clenched silence of the adolescent, the nonsense cries from the stage-happening, are resolutely strategic. The insurgent and the freak-out have broken off discourse with a cultural system which they despise as a cruel, antiquated fraud. They will not bandy words with it. Accept, even momentarily, the conventions of literate linguistic exchange, and you are caught in the net of the old values, of the grammars that can condescend or enslave.

I don't worry about traditions overmuch. The fact is, I could change my mind as to whether I want something. For one reason or another, it could lose its appeal.

Conservatism is the cousin of cowardice.

In a sense, 'Twin Peaks' never really went away. They've got a 'Twin Peaks' convention up in Washington every year, and I'm pretty much recognized on a fairly regular basis from 'Twin Peaks,' so I feel like it never really got too far away.

I wasn't looking for another marriage. I had been married before. He is a nice man - a geologist, an Ernest Hemingway type. But Paul and I married because of convention.

Any professional knows that the flute and the piano is a boring combination. All you've got to arrive at is a kind of typical gestural crap, right? You might agree, though you wouldn't call it gestural crap.

I always like playing with some sort of typical convention or idea and turning it over.

So the result was that as one approached a political convention for most of the 19th century and for most of the 20th century until the 1960's, part of the drama was the fact that you didn't know ultimately who was going to be the nominee at the end of that convention week.

Looking good has never been the most important thing to me. Maybe it's because I'm more conventionally, um, acceptable, so it's not an issue for me. I don't know.

It was in that uncertain world that the European Convention on Human Rights was shaped. Written by Conservatives, it set out the principles which should lie behind a modern democratic state, where human rights were respected.

Look, this CPAC convention is increasingly the Star Wars bar scene of the conservative movement. All that's missing from that convention is a couple of Wookies.

Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.

Conventional wisdom is no wisdom at all. Conventional wisdom is taking somebody else's word for the way things are It's the followers of this world who rely on assumption. Not the leaders.

The conventional wisdom is often wrong.

Conventional wisdom would have one believe.

The biggest handicap in research is an ability to think outside the box. The handicap is being encumbered by all the conventional wisdom in a given field.

Conventional wisdom can get us into so much trouble, especially as artists.

We die to each other daily. What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then. To pretend that they and we are the same is a useful and convenient social convention which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember that at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.

While she was no radical, no natural breaker of rules, no seeker of the bold statement, she was in her own serene way uncaring of convention and others' opinions.

441. While she was no radical, no natural breaker of rules, no seeker of the bold statement, she was in her own serene way uncaring of convention and others' opinions.

Being the keynote speaker at the convention this year is an honor I don't take lightly. I know I've got some big shoes to fill. Two conventions ago, the keynote speaker was a guy named Barack Obama.

In his tub-thumping speech at the 2008 Republican National Convention, Romney sounded like the hedge-fund tycoon he is.

Acceptance speeches can make or break presidential candidacies. It was Al Gore's 2000 acceptance speech that relaunched his candidacy and nearly saved him. John Kerry's speech and overall ineffective convention nearly sank him in 2004 (though he was almost saved by the debates).