Conventions Quotes
More Conventions Quotes
One usually understands the art of the past by applying the conventions of the present thus misunderstanding the art of the past.
Sol LeWitt— 1969 'Sentences on Conceptual Art', in Art-Language, vol.1, no.1, May.
The personal things should be left out of platforms at conventions.... You can argue yourself blue in the face, and you’re not going to change each other’s minds. It’s a waste of your time and my time.
barbara bush— On the abortion debate, in which her stance was the opposite of her husband's, as quoted in TIME magazine (24 August 1992)
Art, it seems to me, should simplify. That, indeed, is very nearly the whole of the higher artistic process; finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole — so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader's consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page.
willa cather— On the Art of Fiction" ~ Originally published in The Borzoi 1920 (1920)
Brought up to respect the conventions, love had to end in marriage. I'm afraid it did.
bette davis— Ashton Applewhite, Tripp Evans, Andrew Frothingham, And I Quote: The Definitive Collection of Quotes, Sayings, and Jokes for the Contemporary Speechmaker, Macmillan, 1992, ISBN 0312068972, p. 383.
The immaterial told me that I was indeed an occidental, a right-thinking Christian who believes in the ‘Resurrection of the flesh’. A whole phenomenology then appeared, but a phenomenology without ideas, or rather without any of the systems of official conventions. What appeared was distinct from form and became Immediacy. ‘The mark of the immediate’ – that was what I needed.
yves klein— 1960; in: "Yves Klein, 1928 – 1962, Selected Writings", ed. J & J, the Tate Gallery, London 1974, p. 53
A childish feeling, I admit, but, 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.
mikhail lermontov— A Hero of Our Time
On stage you can group 200 people together and scare them or embarrass them or whatever. You can't do that on TV. You have to use the conventions, that's why Kevin (Turvey) works so well.
rik mayall— New Musical Express, November 7, 1981 [1]
Over the past fifty years or so, scientists have allowed the conventions of expression available to them to become entirely too confining.
david mermin— N. David Mermin (1990). Boojums all the way through: communicating science in a prosaic age. Cambridge University Press. p. xi. ISBN 0-521-38880-5.
“I have long been alarmed by people’s sheeplike acceptance of the term ‘computer technology’ — it sounds so objective and inexorable — when most computer technology is really a bunch of ideas turned into conventions and packages.”
ted nelson— Quoted in In Venting, a Computer Visionary Educates by John Markoff, published January 10, 2009 in the New York Times, page BU4 of the New York edition.
My dynamite will sooner lead to peace than a thousand world conventions. As soon as men will find that in one instant, whole armies can be utterly destroyed, they surely will abide by golden peace.
alfred nobel— As quoted in The Military Quotation Book (2002) by James Charlton, p. 114
We have signed international conventions, such as on women's rights, and we should respect them.
— "Senior Saudi royal demands reform". BBC News. 5 September 2007.
His eyes measured the little chamber. How two people could survive in so small a space was as difficult to grasp as the conventions in contract bridge. Perhaps there was some simple key that would solve the problem, and he would have the subject of another book.
j. g. ballard— p. 8 (Empire of the Sun (1984))
What is called "objectivity," scientific for instance (in which I firmly believe, in a given situation) imposes itself only within a context which is extremely vast, old, firmly established, or rooted in a network of conventions … and yet which still remains a context.
jacques derrida— Limited Inc (1977)
[I]f texts are unified by a central logic of argument, then their pictorial illustrations are integral to the ensemble, not pretty little trifles included only for aesthetic or commercial value. Primates are visual animals, and (particularly in science) illustration has a language and set of conventions all its own.
stephen jay gould— p. 18 (Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle (1987))
Why does almost everything seem to me like its own parody? Why must I think that almost all, no, all the methods and conventions of art today are good for parody only?
thomas mann— Ch. 15 (Doctor Faustus (1947))
The member of a culture … purposely avoids the relationship of intimacy; he wants the object somehow depicted and fictionalized. … He is embarrassed when this is taken out of its context of proper sentiments and presented bare, for he feels that this is a reintrusion of that world which his whole conscious effort has sought to banish. Forms and conventions are the ladder of ascent. And hence the speechlessness of the man of culture when he beholds the barbarian tearing aside some veil which is half adornment, half concealment.
richard weaver— p. 26 (Ideas have Consequences (1948))
Jesus was an anarchist. … Many of his actions flouted religious, social, Establishment and political conventions and the alternative he offered dared people to return to a natural and simple lifestyle.
— Tom O'Golo, in Christ? No! Jesus? Yes!: A radical reappraisal of a very important life (2011), pp.132
Two types of conventions [ in organizational settings] may be distinguished here: (a) conventional rules of behavior demonstrated in the classroom mental experience (?rst part of the story) and (b) conventional representation of the world revealed in the following discussions with ‘‘experienced” friends (second part).
— Rouslan Koumakhov Conventions in Herbert Simon’s theory of bounded rationality, Journal of Economic Psychology xxx (2009), p. 2
Journalism may not dare too much. It can be gently humorous and ironic, very lightly touched by idiosyncrasy, but it must not repel readers by digging too deeply. This is especially true of its approach to language: the conventions are not questioned.
— Anthony Burgess, A Mouthful of Air: Language and Languages, Especially English (1992).
A childish feeling, I admit, but, 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.
mikhail lermontov— Mikhail Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time
Common sense will nearly always stand you in better stead than a slavish adherence to the conventions .
— Anonymous, in [ Mills & Boon Regency Collection 2012
I haven't decided if he deserved to eat bread made out of sticks or live in a rancid puddle, probably because I haven't made up my mind whether anyone deserves such treatment, though I suspect that the day a person gives up on the Geneva conventions is the day a person gives up on the human race.
sarah vowell— p. 81 On Samuel Mudd
If you suspend the Geneva conventions, give the green light to anything that will get intelligence, round up thousands all over the globe with reckless disregard for guilt or innocence, you are effectively and knowingly issuing orders to seize innocent people and torture them. Any president who decides to do that and then says it was not his intention to do that is a fraud or a fool.
Andrew Sullivan— "'Disgrace,' Ctd.," The Daily Dish (2008-06-19)
The Genocide Convention of 1948 and other United Nations conventions strengthen the claims of genocide victims, including the Greeks, Assyrians and Armenians of Asia Minor.
— Alfred de Zayas, JD, PhD, Human Rights - International Law - and the Armenian Genocide, 2005
Every time [psychiatry] comes across a natural act that is contrary to the prevailing conventions, it brands this act as a symptom of mental derangement or abnormality.
— René Guyon, as cited in The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (1997), Thomas Szasz, p. 167
