Conventions Quotes - Page 7

• New images surround us everywhere. They are invisible only because of sterile routine convention and fear.

  Lisette Model

  Routine, Invisible, Surround

  Ann Thomas, Lisette Model, National Gallery of Canada (1990). “Lisette Model”, National Gallery of Canada

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• As the Democrats get revved up at their convention in Boston, President Bush is fighting back the only way he knows how: by going on vacation! Ah, it's nice to take a rest, replenish your supply of smirks. The vacation was expected, because Bush traditionally takes a month off every summer to relax and avoid reading National Security Warnings.

  Craig Kilborn

  Summer, Nice, Reading

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• Journalistic conventions make it hard for reporters to deal with a big, complicated lie.

  Michael Kinsley

  Lying, Complicated, Bigs

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• For me, on every project, I realize that I've boxed myself into a corner, or that the play necessitates some sort of theatrical convention that I realize I hate while I'm making it. So then the next play is always a rebellion. Or like, the thing I didn't even realize I was doing last time I will make sure I don't do this time. But there's always some other blind spot. And then that blind spot inspires the play that comes after.

  Annie Baker

  Hate, Play, Blind Spots

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• [O]ur sages in the great [constitutional] convention... intended our government should be a republic which differs more widely from a democracy than a democracy from a despotism. The rigours of a despotism often... oppress only a few, but it is the very essence and nature of a democracy, for a faction claiming to oppress a minority, and that minority the chief owners of the property and truest lovers of their country.

  Fisher Ames

  Country, Government, Essence

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• History of America, Part I (1776-1966): Declaration of Independence, Constitutional Convention, Louisiana Purchase, Civil War, Reconstruction, World War I, Great Depression, New Deal, World War II, TV, Cold war, civil-rights movement, Vietnam. History of America, Part II (1967-present): the Super Bowl era. The Super Bowl has become Main Street’s Mardi Gras.

  Norman Chad

  War, America, Rights

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• At the very least, participatory involvement with the many forms of art can enable us to see more in our experience, to hear more on normally unheard frequencies, to become conscious of what daily routines have obscured, what habit and convention have suppressed.

  Maxine Greene

  Art, Habit, Conscious

  Maxine Greene (1995). “Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Education, the Arts, and Social Change”, Jossey-Bass

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• All young people want to kick up their heels and defy convention; most of them would prefer to do it at a not too heavy cost.

  Elmer Davis

  People, Cost, Want

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• Religion is indeed a convention which a man must be bred in to endure with any patience; and yet religion, for all its poetic motley, comes closer than work-a-day opinion to the heart of things.

  George Santayana

  Heart, Men, Religion

  George Santayana (1937). “The Works of George Santayana: Dialogues in limbo. Platonism and the spiritual life. A long way round to Nirvana. The prestige of the infinite. Ultimate religion”

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• The violent illiteracies of the graffiti, the clenched silence of the adolescent, the nonsense cries from the stage-happening, are resolutely strategic. The insurgent and the freak-out have broken off discourse with a cultural system which they despise as a cruel, antiquated fraud. They will not bandy words with it. Accept, even momentarily, the conventions of literate linguistic exchange, and you are caught in the net of the old values, of the grammars that can condescend or enslave.

  George Steiner

  Broken, Silence, Society

  George Steiner (1987). “George Steiner: A Reader”, p.432, Oxford University Press on Demand

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• Intellect has nothing to do with equality except to respect it as a sublime convention.

  Jacques Barzun

  Equality, Sublime, Intellect

  Jacques Barzun (1959). “The House of Intellect”

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• Death is a convention, a certification to the end of pain, something for the vital statistics book, not binding upon anyone but the keepers of graveyard records.

  Wallace Stegner

  Death, Pain, Book

  Wallace Earle Stegner (1995). “Where the bluebird sings to the lemonade springs: living and writing in the West”, Random House Value Pub

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• No good poetry is ever written in a manner twenty years old, for to write in such a manner shows conclusively that the writer thinks from books, convention and cliché, not from real life.

  Ezra Pound

  Real, Book, Writing

  Ezra Pound (1918). “Pavannes and Divisions”

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• In sci-fi convention, life-forms that hadn't developed space travel were mere prehistory -- horse-shoe crabs of the cosmic scene -- and something of the humiliation of being stuck on a provincial planet in a galactic backwater has stayed with me ever since.

  Barbara Ehrenreich

  Horse, Shoes, Space

  Barbara Ehrenreich (1990). “WORST YEARS OF OUR LIVES”, Pantheon

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• Read good books. Read bad books - and figure out why you don't like them. Then don't do it when you write. If you are a science fiction or fantasy writer, going to conventions and attending panels is very useful.

  Patricia Briggs

  Book, Writing, Fiction

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• Democritus sometimes does away with what appears to the senses, and says that none of these appears according to truth but only according to opinion: the truth in real things is that there are atoms and void. 'By convention sweet', he says, 'by convention bitter, by convention hot, by convention cold, by convention colour: but in reality atoms and void.'

  Sextus Empiricus

  Sweet, Real, Science

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• I know Teddy Kennedy had fun at the Democratic convention when he said that I said that trees and vegetation caused 80 percent of the air pollution in this country. ... Well, now he was a little wrong about what I said. I didn't say 80 percent. I said 92 percent-93 percent, pardon me. And I didn't say air pollution, I said oxides of nitrogen. Growing and decaying vegetation in this land are responsible for 93 percent of the oxides of nitrogen. ... If we are totally successful and can eliminate all the manmade oxides of nitrogen, we'll still have 93 percent as much as we have in the air today.

  Ronald Reagan

  Country, Fun, Successful

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• The only true solution would be a convention under which all the governments would bind themselves to defend collectively any country that was attacked.

  Alfred Nobel

  Country, War, Government

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• New forms of media - first movies, then television, talk radio and now the Internet - tend to challenge traditional codes of conduct. They flout convention, shake up the status quo and sometimes provoke outrage.

  Willow Bay

  Media, Challenges, Television

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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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• 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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• 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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• If we really want to make progress and achieve greater fairness as a society, it is time for elemental change. And we should start by looking at the Constitution, with the goal of holding a new Constitutional Convention.

  Larry Sabato

  Goal, Progress, Want

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• For the surface, I'm not interested in painterly convention. It's more interesting if it looks like it painted itself.

  Wanda Koop

  Interesting, Looks, Surface

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• It's the fact that fans still care. I like all the comics conventions: The smaller ones are easier, the bigger ones are exciting.... Each one I say: Never again. But they're all great.... These things are important because they keep the fans' interest alive in comics. They keep the fans reading and their imaginations stimulated.

  Stan Lee

  Reading, Imagination, Important

  "COMIC-CON 2010: Legend STAN LEE talks 'geek power,' new movies - & why he was embarrassed to be a comic-book writer". Interview with Michael Cavna, voices.washingtonpost.com. July 23, 2010.

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