Quotes About Convention

If I hadn't happened then to duck down a side street and pass a hotel where a convention for the deaf was being held, there is every chance that my mind would have cracked completely

Manuel is a superb engineer with no imagination whatsoever, which makes him doubly dangerous - talent married to convention.

There's a convention that one doesn't speak ill of the dead. That's stupid, I think. The truth's always the truth. On the whole it's better to keep your mouth shut about living people. You might conceivably injure them. The dead are past that. But the harm they've done lives after them sometimes.

I thought this convention phenomenon was very flattering, but that's about the extent of it.

I am so happy that I didn't go to school and I didn't have anyone to tell me how to position my fingers on the piano correctly. And what you do with music and what is the correct way to write it and what is not the correct way to write it.

On big issues like war in Iraq, but in many other issues they simply must be multilateral. There's no other way around. You have the instances like the global warming convention, the Kyoto protocol, when the U.S. went its own way.

I was at the 1976 Republican Convention in Kansas City. I was running 'Nobody for President' at the time. I printed up these press releases and handed them out to the crowd at the Kemper Arena. 'Nobody keeps campaign promises.' 'Nobody lowers your taxes.' 'Nobody should have that much power.' 'Nobody is in Washington working for you.'

What could she do, bound as she was by the tyranny of silence? She dared not explain the girl to herself...that wilfully selfish tyranny of silence evolved by a crafty old ostrich of a world for its own well-being and comfort. The world hid its head in the sands of convention, so that seeing nothing it might avoid Truth...if silence is golden it is also in this case, very expedient.

There's something to be said for doing things a certain way.

I met a bunch of comic-book writers at the Metropolis convention and there was such an interesting discussion about the story of 'Supergirl' and trying to get it right. It can be a challenge, because you don't want it to be the same as the Superman story.

In the 1960s, as a rising defense intellectual, Kissinger was a Nelson Rockefeller man, firmly entrenched in the center-right establishment. When he attended the infamous 1964 Republican convention in San Francisco, he was horrified by Goldwater supporters, whom he likened to fascists.

At first the English were very surprised by our disregarding the Hague Convention. But from 1916 onward they used at least as much poison as we did.

Six books after the surprises of 'Full Dark House,' the Bryant and May novels continue to stay within the bounds of formula by straining against them in new ways.

Honour often seems a highly artificial convention, but life in any level of society where it has been abandoned astonishes by its tortuousness

it is only because of the weird convention, almost universally accepted (see the quotation from Douglas Adams here), that religious faith is uniquely privileged: above and beyond criticism. Insulting a restaurant might seem trivial compared to insulting God. But restaurateurs and chefs really exist and they have feelings to be hurt, whereas blasphemy, as the witty bumper sticker puts it, is a victimless crime.

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

it was a crime to take anything too seriously, as oppressed as we felt by the adult and conventional world. All the most serious art is not only sad but hilarious. What other intelligent way to live is there but to laugh about it? The alternative, also respectable, is suicide. But how could you do that? Not only would it betray a woeful lack of humor, but it would keep you from finding out what was going to happen next.

The conventional accept and are frequently charmed by a certain unconventionality.

Do you know what Nabokov said about adultery in his lecture on Madame Bovary? He said it was 'a most conventional way to rise above the conventional'.

I deliberately let him stew in uncertainty, adding now and then an ill-tempered thrust. I didn't bear him any personal grudge. I was doubtless only trying to take my revenge against the convention of faces.

If the convention of the face were empty, perhaps a disguise too was just as empty.

All men are alike. If you ask any American man, 'How are you?' he'll answer 'Fine,' even if his mother just had a heart attack.

My favorite part of Comic-Con? The groupies. Man, they have loose morals, really. Men, women, I'm just saying that it gets weird on Sunday night. No, that's sadly never happened.

A rigged convention is one with the other man's delegates in control. An open convention is when your delegates are in control.