Convention Quotes

The media. It sounds like a convention of spiritualists. (Tom Stoppard)
After four years at the United Nations I sometimes yearn for the peace and tranquillity of a political convention. View quote
Adlai Stevenson II
Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves. View quote
Bertrand Russell
A wise man once said, Convention is like the shell to the chick, a protection till he is strong enough to break it through. View quote
Learned Hand
The greatest misfortune of the wise man and the greatest unhappiness of the fool are based upon convention. View quote
Franz Schubert
A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention. View quote
Aldous Huxley
The disruptive powers of excessive national fecundity may have played a greater part in bursting the bonds of convention than either the power of ideas or the errors of autocracy. View quote
John Maynard Keynes
If we examine the Hague Convention carefully, we see that it considers the offer of good offices a duty of every nation. In other words, such offers should be made whenever a dispute becomes critical and threatens to explode into war. View quote
Charles Albert Gobat
As Bill Clinton said so eloquently at the convention, during Vietnam there was a chance to serve; there was a chance not to serve. View quote
Mark Shields
2004 was a great year for Boston! The Patriots won the Super Bowl! Boston hosted its first national political convention! And - the Red Sox won the World Series! View quote
Thomas Menino
The musical scale is a convention which circumscribes the area of potentiality and permits construction within those limits in its own particular symmetry. (Iannis Xenakis)
Did you ever notice how many survivors they have? Did you ever notice that? Everybody - every time you turn around, 15,000 survivors meet here; 400 survivors convention there. I mean, did you ever notice? Nazis sure were inefficient, weren't they? Boy, boy, boy!...You almost have no survivors that ever say they saw a gas chamber or saw the workings of a gas chamber.... they'll say these preposterous stories that anybody can check out to be a lie, an absolute lie. View quote
David Duke
A political convention is after all not a meeting of a corporation's board of directors; it is a fiesta, a carnival, a pig-rooting, horse-snorting, band-playing, voice-screaming medieval get-together of greed, practical lust, compromised idealism, career-advancement, meeting, feud, vendetta, conciliation, of rabble-rousers, fist fights (as it used to be), embraces, drunks (again as it used to be) and collective rivers of animal sweat. View quote
Norman Mailer
There seemed to be some heavenly support beneath his shoulder blades that lifted his feet from the ground in ecstatic suspension, as if he secretly enjoyed the ability to fly but was walking as a compromise to convention. View quote
Zelda Fitzgerald
To play with baubles is our ambition, not to deal with grave questions in a spirit of serious energy. But while we are playing with baubles, with our Legislative Councils, our Simultaneous Examinations, our ingenious schemes for separating the judicial from the executive functions, - while we, I say, are finessing about trifles, the waters of the great deep are being stirred and that surging chaos of the primitive man over which our civilised societies are superimposed on a thin crust of convention, is being strangely and ominously agitated. View quote
Sri Aurobindo
... coincident with the explosive growth of research, the art of writing science suffered a grave setback, and the stultifying convention descended that the best scientific prose should sound like a non-human author addressing a mechanical reader. ... We injure ourselves when we fail to make our discipline as clear and vibrant as we can to students - prospective scientists - and to the public who pay the taxes. View quote
David Mermin
Gold and silver are constituted, by the nature of things, money, and universal money, independent of all convention, and of all laws. View quote
Anne Robert Jacques Turgot
We cleave to the past too much in Germany. All of our German art is too bogged down in the conventional... I think more highly of a free person who consciously puts convention aside. View quote
Paula Modersohn-Becker
Most men's conscience, habits, and opinions are borrowed from convention and gather continual comforting assurances from the same social consensus that originally suggested them. View quote
George Santayana
One of my movies was called "True Lies." It's what the Democrats should have called their convention. View quote
Arnold Schwarzenegger
"Elohim," the name for the creative power in Genesis, is a female plural, a fact that generations of learned rabbis and Christian theologians have all explained as merely grammatical convention. The King James and most other Bibles translate it as "God," but if you take the grammar literally, it seems to mean "goddesses." Al Shaddai, god of battles, appears later, and YHWH, mispronounced Jehovah, later still. (Robert Anton Wilson)
London goes beyond any boundary or convention. It contains every wish or word ever spoken, every action or gesture ever made, every harsh or noble statement ever expressed. It is illimitable. It is Infinite London. View quote
Peter Ackroyd
In every art we are always obliged to return to the accepted means of expression, the conventional language of the art. What is a black-and-white drawing but a convention to which the beholder has become so accustomed that with his mind's eye he sees a complete equivalent in the translation from nature? View quote
Eugène Delacroix
When a man and a woman have an overwhelming passion for each other, it seems to me, in spite of such obstacles dividing them as parents or husband, that they belong to each other in the name of Nature, and are lovers by Divine right, in spite of human convention or the laws. View quote
Nicolas Chamfort
The psychotherapist ... tries to help the individual to be himself and to go it alone without giving unnecessary offense to his community, to be in the world (of social convention) but not of the world. View quote
Alan Watts