Quotes on Conventions

The man or nation of high culture may acknowledge to great lengths the restraints imposed by conventions and honour, but beyond a certain point, primitive will or desire cannot be curbed.

I think my favourite thing about doing conventions is the parents taking their kids to see their favourite drag idols, because open-minded, progressive parents are making such a change in the world right now. The more open-minded these kids are being raised, the more hope I have for the future.

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.

On stage, generally speaking, the story is stopped or held back by songs, because that's the convention. Audiences enjoy the song and the singer, that's the point.

We consider these settlements to be contrary to the Geneva Convention, that occupied territory should not be changed by establishment of permanent settlements by the occupying power.

The laws of Nature, that is to say the laws of God, plainly made every human being a law unto himself, we must steadfastly refuse to obey those laws, and we must as steadfastly stand by the conventions which ignore them, since the statutes furnish us peace, fairly good government, and stability, and therefore are better for us than the laws of God, which would soon plunge us into confusion and disorder and anarchy if we should adopt them.

When we retire from the conventions of society and draw close to nature, we involuntarily become children: each attribute acquired by experience falls away from the soul, which becomes anew such as it was once and will surely be again.

Bound by conventions, people tend to reach for what is easy. Here we must be unafraid of what is difficult. For all living beings in nature must unfold in their particular way and become themselves despite all opposition.

A radical and transformative thought goes nowhere without the willingness to challenge convention.

To be free from convention is not to spurn it but not to be deceived by it.

Our friends at the Republican convention were more than happy to talk about everything they think is wrong with America, but they didn't have much to say about how they'd make it right. They want your vote, but they don't want you to know their plan.

Whenever we have seen a crevice in the crust of convention, we have called attention to it, because we have hoped for a force underneath, which will someday come to light.

Who on earth invented the silly convention that it is boring or impolite to talk shop? Nothing is more interesting to listen to, especially if the shop is not one's own.

I went to the Democratic Convention as a journalist, and returned a cold-blooded revolutionary.

Sweet exists by convention, bitter by convention, color by convention; but in reality atoms and the void alone exist

For the film maker must come by his convention, as painters and writers and musicians have done before him.

But as the plan of the convention aims only at a partial union or consolidation, the State governments would clearly retain all the rights of sovereignty which they before had, and which were not, by that act, EXCLUSIVELY delegated to the United States.

[T]he Constitution ought to be the standard of construction for the laws, and that wherever there is an evident opposition, the laws ought to give place to the Constitution. But this doctrine is not deducible from any circumstance peculiar to the plan of convention, but from the general theory of a limited Constitution.

The business being thus closed . . . dined together and took a cordial leave of each other After which I returned to my lodgings, did some business with and received the papers from the secretary of the Convention, and retired to meditate on the momentous work which had been executed.

The Convention probably foresaw what it has been a principal aim of these papers to inculcate that the danger which most threatens our political welfare is, that the state governments will finally sap the foundations of the Union.

Every democratic system evolves its own conventions. It is not only the water but the banks which make the river.