21 Quotes About Convention

Abraham Lincoln quoted the Scriptures in an 1858 speech to the Illinois Republican Convention. He said, “ A house divided against itself cannot stand.” That, I fear, is where diversity leads. If by that term we refer to love and tolerance for peoples who are different from one another, it has great validity for us. But if by diversity we mean that all of us have been given reason to resent one another. Having no common values, heritage, commitment, or hope, then we are a nation in serious trouble. James C. Dobson

We will feel conviction about the things we create only if we keep discovering, within those creations, new reasons for wanting them to be that way. William L. Hubbard

I'm convinced that the best solutions are often the ones that are counterintuitive - that challenge conventional thinking - and end in breakthroughs. It is always easier to do things the same old way..why change? To fight this, keep your dissatisfaction index high and break with tradition. Don't be too quick to accept the way things are being done. Question whether there's a better way. Very often you will find that once you make this break from the usual way - and incidentally, this is probably the hardest thing to do–and start on a new track your horizon of new thoughts immediately broadens. New ideas flow in like water. Always keep your interests broad - don't let your mind be stunted by a limited view. . Nathaniel J. Wyeth

The names of entities that have the power to constrain us change with time. Convention and authority are replaced by infirmity. But my attitude toward them has not changed. Has not changed. Cormac McCarthy

He needed the people and the clamour around him. There was no questions and no doubts when he stood on a platform over a sea of faces; the air was heavy, compact, saturated with a single solvent-admiration; there was no room for anything else. He was great; great as the number of people who told him so. He was right; right as the number of people who believed it. He looked at the faces, at the eyes, he saw himself born in them, he saw himself granted the gift of life. That was Peter Keating, that, the reflection in those staring pupils, and his body was only it's reflection. Ayn Rand

Like Alan Turing, Zuse was educated in a system that focused on a child's emotional and philosophical life as well as his intellectual life, and at the end of school, like Turing, Zuse found himself to be something of an outsider–to the disappointment of his very conventional parents, he no longer believed in God or religion.( Jane Smiley (2010). The Man Who Invented the Computer) Konrad Zuse

I have always thought that people are, by nature, nomadic, but they’ve built up anti-human constructs to keep them in place and then they pop pills to mask their misery and look for ways to distract from their emptiness. Jackie Haze

And [Asimov]'ll sign anything, hardbacks, softbacks, other people's books, scraps of paper. Inevitably someone handed him a blank check on the occasion when I was there, and he signed that without as much as a waver to his smile – except that he signed: 'Harlan Ellison. Isaac Asimov

I never learned to say shit before a lady. I don't believe in progress in quite the way you seem to. You believe in it more than Grandmother did. As for those purely cultural patterns of convention you think I ought to escape from, they happen to add up to civilization, and I'd rather be civilized than tribal or uncouth. Wallace Stegner

What could she do, bound as she was by the tyranny of silence? She dared not explain the girl to herself...that wilfully selfish tyranny of silence evolved by a crafty old ostrich of a world for its own well-being and comfort. The world hid its head in the sands of convention, so that seeing nothing it might avoid Truth...if silence is golden it is also in this case, very expedient. Radclyffe Hall

Conventions are, indeed, all that shield us from the shivering void, though often they do so but poorly and desperately. Robert Aickman

Just because you have stolen someone's heart, luckily owned and occupied as a home, doesn't give you the audacity to enforce hurtful policies. Michael Bassey Johnson

It is not only the hostility of others that may prevent us from questioning the status quo. Our will to doubt can be just as powerfully sapped by an internal sense that societal conventions must have a sound basis, even if we are not sure exactly what this may be, because they have been adhered to by a great many people for a long time. It seems implausible that our society could be gravely mistaken in its beliefs, and at the same time, that we would be alone in noticing the fact. We stifle our doubts, and follow the flock, because we cannot conceive of ourselves as pioneers of hitherto unknown difficult truths. It is for help in overcoming our meekness that we can turn to the philosopher. Alain De Botton

Let us not take it for granted that life exists more in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small. Virginia Woolf

Public opinion is to an unconventional idea … what abortion is to sperm. Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Anyhow, whether undergraduate or shop boy, man or woman, it must come as a shock about the age of twenty–the world of the elderly–thrown up in such black outline upon what we are; upon the reality; the moors and Byron; the sea and the lighthouse; the sheep’s jaw with the yellow teeth in it; upon the obstinate irrepressible conviction which makes youth so intolerably disagreeable–“ I am what I am, and intend to be it, ” for which there will be no form in the world unless Jacob makes one for himself. The Plumers will try to prevent him from making it. Wells and Shaw and the serious sixpenny weeklies will sit on its head. Virginia Woolf

To be called insane: challenge convention. To be called possessed: challenge religion. Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Being classy is my teenage rebellion. Rebecca McKinsey