Malcolm Gladwell
Journalist, Author
"A radical and transformative thought goes nowhere without the willingness to challenge convention."
Conventions quotes
Conventions
97 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Sri Aurobindo
Philosopher, Poet, Politician
"All thoughts, desires, conventions, attachments which come from outside must be ruthlessly pushed away."
Jacques Derrida
Philosopher, Linguist
"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."
Thomas Jefferson
Politician, Founding Father
"[The Federal Convention] is really an assembly of demigods."
Mark Twain
Writer, Humorist
"The convention missionaries call "modesty" has no standard, and cannot have one, because it is opposed to nature and reason and is therefore an artificiality and subject to anybody's whim - anybody's diseased caprice."
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside conventions — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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Conventions quotes (page 1 of 5)
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"It is not human nature we should accuse but the despicable conventions that pervert it."
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"Outside Independence Hall when the Constitutional Convention of 1787 ended"
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"Money does not arise by convention, any more than the state does. It arises out of exchange, and arises naturally out of exchange; it is a product of the same."
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"Convention is the ruler of all."
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"Only words and conventions can isolate us from the entirely undefinable something which is everything."
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"No action is in itself good or bad, but only such according to convention."
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"I went to the Democratic Convention as a journalist, and returned a cold-blooded revolutionary."
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"To be free from convention is not to spurn it but not to be deceived by it."
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"I swear fearfully at the conventions of the stage."
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"Setting out rules for waging war (the Geneva Convention)."
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"Society's the mother of convention."
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"A lot of people bring it to me at conventions. At first I was going, "I can't sign that. That's not me." And now I just say, "Eh, whatever.""
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"A convention is an agreed-upon falsehood, a permitted lie."
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"Art flouts convention. Convention became convention because it works."
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"We didn't discover our values in a poll taken a week before the convention."
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"If you are going to kill the families of terrorists, realize that there's something called the Geneva Convention we're going to have to pull out of. It would defy every norm that is America."
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"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."
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"In our time the blasphemies are threadbare. Pessimism is now patently, as it always was essentially, more commonplace than piety. Profanity is now more than an affectation - it is a convention. The curse against God is Exercise I in the primer of minor poetry."
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"The conventions of society are all in the interests of morality. If you're conventional, you'll be good, in a negative sense, of course."
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"Conventions are often more cruel than the law."
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