Conventions Quotes - Page 9

• This would be a very good moment to institute a call for imposing the Chemical Weapons Convention on the Middle East. The actual Chemical Weapons Convention. Not the version that [Barack] Obama presented in his address to the nation and that media commentators repeat. What he said is that the convention bars the use of chemical weapons. He knows better. And so do the commentators. The Chemical Weapons Convention calls for banning the production, storage and use of chemical weapons, not just the use. So why omit production and storage?

  Noam Chomsky

  Media, Bars, Use

  "Noam Chomsky | On Shutdown, Waning US Influence, Syrian Showdown". truthout.org. October 8, 2013.

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• The most curious social convention of the great age in which we live is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected. Its evil effects must be plain enough to everyone. All it accomplishes is (a) to throw a veil of sanctity about ideas that violate every intellectual decency, and (b) to make every theologian a sort of chartered libertine. No doubt it is mainly to blame for the appalling slowness with which really sound notions make their way in the world.

  H. L. Mencken

  Religious, Ideas, Evil

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.80, Vintage

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• People come up to me at conventions and say, 'I was such an outcast, I felt like such a geek, and when I saw you, you made me feel like such a normal person.' It's my favorite thing to hear, because that's how I felt when I was a kid. If Goth would've been around, I would've definitely been Goth. But there wasn't such a thing, so I was just weird.

  Cassandra Peterson

  Kids, People, Saws

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• I enjoy thinking myself into other times and places. I don't like some of the conventions of the 'historical novel', but I think there's a way of doing it that has a lot of merit.

  Hari Kunzru

  Thinking, Historical Novels, Way

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• Israel produces and stores chemical weapons. So therefore the US will prevent the Chemical Weapons Convention from being imposed on the Middle East. But it's necessary to evade this by misrepresenting the convention, and I think maybe 100 percent of the media, or close to it, go along. But that's a critical issue. Actually, Syria's chemical weapons were developed largely as a deterrent to Israeli nuclear weapons. Also, not mentioned.

  Noam Chomsky

  Thinking, Media, Issues

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• I like to razz the Trekkies a little bit. Who doesn't? It's trainspotting, isn't it? But they are very well-meaning, actually. I've done a couple of Star Trek conventions, and they've only been really welcoming.

  Malcolm McDowell

  Stars, Couple, Trainspotting

  Interview with Sam Adams, www.avclub.com. June 21, 2011.

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• A lot of the conventions aren't full of "Cheers" fans. They are more themed for fans of monsters and zombies.

  George Wendt

  Cheer, Zombie, Monsters

  Source: www.washingtontimes.com

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• An ounce of convention is worth a pound of explanation.

  Ethel Mumford

  Pounds, Explanation

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• I believe the United States of America must remain a standard bearer in the conduct of war. That is what makes us different from those whom we fight. That is a source of our strength. That is why I prohibited torture. That is why I ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed. And that is why I have reaffirmed America's commitment to abide by the Geneva conventions. We lose ourselves when we compromise the very ideals that we fight to defend.

  Barack Obama

  War, Believe, Commitment

  Nobel Prize for Peace Acceptance Speech and Lecture, delivered 10 December 2009, Oslo City Hall, Oslo, Norway

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• 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.

  Paula Modersohn-Becker

  Art, Past, Thinking

  "Expressionism". Book by Norbert Wolf and Uta Grosenick, p. 74, 2004.

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• The most degrading of human passions is the fear of death. It tears away the restraints and the conventions which alone make social life possible to man; it reveals the brute in him which underlies them all. In the desperate hand-to-hand struggle for life there is no element of nobility. He who is engaged upon it throws aside honor, he throws aside self-respect, he throws aside all that would make victory worth having - he asks for nothing but bare life.

  Gertrude Bell

  Death, Struggle, Passion

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• I like to play with the conventions around what we expect of paintings historically. But I also like to play with the conventions that you expect from a Kehinde Wiley painting, too.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Play, Painting

  Source: www.artpractical.com

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• a deviation from propriety scarcely ever escapes punishment.

  Regina Maria Roche

  Punishment, Deviation, Propriety

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• The calendar? A mere convention.

  Irina Ratushinskaya

  Time, Calendars, Mere

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• All adventuring is rash, and all innovations dangerous. But not nearly so dangerous as stagnation and dry rot. From grooves, cliques, clichés and resignation - Good Lord deliver us!

  Winifred Holtby

  Innovation, Dry, Lord

  Winifred Holtby, Alice Holtby (1941). “Letters to a friend”

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• I have tried and failed to lead a conventional life. When I try to be like other people, I fall out of bed.

  Marian Engel

  Fall, People, Trying

  Marian Engel (1985). “The Tattooed Woman”, Markham, Ont. : Penguin Books Canada

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• There is a tendency under capitalism system to reduce everything to a kind of commodity fetish, and this order tends to promote extremely conventional and uniform expressions of gender and sexuality in order to promote certain products and lifestyle choices that are commercialized. This necessarily entails a capitulation to heteronormativity, or in the case of the new gay movement, a "homonormativity" that doesn't stray far from the heterosexual paradigm. Anyone who questions these normative values and conventions is subject to disapproval, hostility, or even violence.

  Bruce LaBruce

  Gay, Order, Lifestyle Choices

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• My characters are all kind of geek archetypes of people I've encountered at gaming and comic book conventions.

  Ernest Cline

  Book, Character, People

  "Author Ernie Cline Was Told Video Games Would Rot His Brain, But Who Holds the High Score Now?". Interview with Michael Mechanic, www.motherjones.com. July 10, 2015.

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• If you're 25 years old dressed up like Superman at a comic book convention, that's great. If you're 78 and you're doing it, something's wrong.

  Billy Bob Thornton

  Book, Years, Comic

  Source: www.hollywoodreporter.com

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• The nice thing about doing a pop opera is that, because the convention is set from the beginning that this is an opera and everything is sung, there is never that feeling of "Why is this person bursting out into song?" because the whole thing is sung.

  Lea Salonga

  Song, Nice, Feelings

  Source: www.broadwayworld.com

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• The ancients waited for cherry blossoms, grieved when they were gone, and lamented their passing in countless poems. How very ordinary the poems had seemed to Sachiko when she read them as a girl, but now she knew, as well as one could know, that grieving over fallen cherry blossoms was more than a fad or convention.

  Junichiro Tanizaki

  Girl, Grieving, Ordinary

  Junichiro Tanizaki (1957). “The Makioka Sisters”

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• I always thought it'd be fun to go to a sci-fi convention, watch a bunch of Klingons walking around, all of that kind of stuff.

  Michael Welch

  Fun, Watches, Stuff

  "Jacked In". Interview with David Read, www.gateworld.net. July 30, 2004.

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• A man, at least, is free; he can explore every passion, every land, overcome obstacles, taste the most distant pleasures. But a woman is continually thwarted. Inert and pliant at the same time, she must struggle against both the softness of her flesh and subjection to the law. Her will, like the veil tied to her hat by a string, flutters with every breeze; there is always some desire luring her on, some convention holding her back.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Women, Struggle, Passion

  Gustave Flaubert (2010). “Madame Bovary: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)”, p.92, Penguin

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• By pretending that convention is Nature, that disobeying a personal prohibition is a medical illness, they establish themselves as agents of social control and at the same time disguise their punitive interventions in the semantic and social trappings of medical practice.

  Thomas Szasz

  Practice, Agents, Medical

  Thomas Stephen Szasz (1997). “The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement”, p.167, Syracuse University Press

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• The purpose of art is... to press forward into the whole of the external world and the soul, to see and communicate those objective realities within it which rule and convention have hitherto concealed.

  Max Scheler

  Art, Reality, Soul

  Max Scheler (2017). “The Nature of Sympathy”, p.388, Routledge

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