Quotes About Convention

Since custom is the principal magistrate of man's life, let men by all means endeavor to obtain good customs.

Man is made of ordinary things, and habit is his nurse.

Money does not arise by convention, any more than the state does. It arises out of exchange, and arises naturally out of exchange; it is a product of the same.

In books and movies infidelity always looks so compelling, so right. Here are people who defy petty convention and are rewarded with only the tastiest bits of human experience.

To study music, we must learn the rules. To create music, we must break them.

What makes bebop legitimate is the fact that when it was done, it was illegitimate.

When people say you're doing something radical in rock or dance music, I'm not sure how special that is. What we do is so old-fashioned. It's like trying to do something innovative in tap-dancing.

Bruce Reid is not the worst batsman there is at international level but those who are worse would not need to hire the Myer Music Bowl to hold a convention.

We are more sensible of what is done against custom than against nature.

Plot is a literary convention. Story is a force of nature.

Custom is almost a second nature.

University convention submerges nature. It issues licenses, and hunting without one is forbidden.

Fog and hypocrisy - that is to say, shadow, convention, decency - these were the very things that lent to London its poetry and romance.

A political convention is just not a place where you come away with any trace of faith in human nature.

What do I bring to the Democratic National Convention that other reporters don't? Hair.

Controversial proposals, once accepted, soon become hallowed.

Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.

Still,[...] in all forms of comics the sequential artist relies upon the tacit cooperation of the reader. This cooperation is based upon the convention of reading and the common cognitive disciplines. Indeed, it is this very voluntary cooperation, so unique to comics, that underlies the contract between artist and audience.

There are no rules for writing a play. It is easy, indeed, to lay down negative recommendations -- to instruct the beginner how not to do it. But most of these "don'ts" are rather obvious; and those which are not obvious are apt to be questionable. It is certain, for instance, that if you want your play to be acted anywhere else than in China, you must not plan it in sixteen acts of an hour apiece; but where is the tyro who needs a textbook to tell him that?

He'll be given everything he's entitled to under the Geneva Convention. We don't want to be accused of doing to him what they did to you.

By convention sour, by convention sweet, by convention colored; in reality, nothing but Atoms and the Void.

When a Cabinet Minister who is sacked for telling lies is re-appointed, in the face of every constitutional convention, only for the same man to be sacked again from the same Cabinet for the same offence by the same Prime Minister no wonder the public are cynical about politics.

the long delay, and the obvious reluctance of the United States to ratify the Genocide Convention" derived from "fear that it might be held responsible, retrospectively, for the annihilation of Indians in the United States, or its role in the slave trade, or its contemporary support for tyrannical governments engaging in mass murder." Still, Kuper said he was delighted that at last the Americans had agreed to the terms of the Convention.

How many things we acquire only because others bought them and because they are in a good many homes. Many of our problems are explained by the fact that we copy the example of others: rather than following reason, we are led astray by convention. If only a few people did something, we wouldn't imitate them. But when the majority starts to act a certain way, we follow along, too, as if something should be more honorable just because it's more frequent.11