Precepts, conventions - above all traditions - have no value in art.
There are a lot of young Canadians who want to be politically active at their college or their university who can't go to the party convention, who can't take part in politics, because they're holding down a job to pay their tuition. These are kids who want to do public service, who want to get involved politically, but their financial situation is precarious.
Science fiction fans are awesome, they love you so much that they'll watch anything you do, even if it's complete crap. I never dreamed that I would go to conventions and sit down and have coffee with a Klingon. It's so weird, but it's my life.
Every day you meet a delegation going to some convention to try and change the way of somebody else's life.
Motherhood is so honorable a thing that nothing - no convention - can possibly make it dishonorable; and from the standpoint of the right of the child . . . the unmarried mother should be granted by society the same reverence and regard as the married mother.
On the surface the avant garde as a whole seems united primarily in terms of what they are against: the rejection of social institutions and established artistic conventions, or antagonism towards the public (as representative of the existing order). By contrast any positive programme tends to be claimed as exclusive property by isolated and even mutually antagonistic sub-groups. So modern art appears fragmented and sectarian, defined as much by manifestos as imaginative work.
The sexual freedom of today for most people is really only a convention, an obligation, a social duty, a social anxiety, a necessary feature of the consumer's way of life.
Armenians, as a people that have survived the Genocide, have a moral duty towards mankind and history in the prevention of genocides. We have done and will continue to do our best to support the persistent implementation of the Genocide Convention. Genocide cannot concern only one people, because it is a crime against humanity.
Society, by insisting on conventions, has merely insisted on certain convenient signs by which we may know that a man is considering, in daily life, the comfort of other people.
The Constitutional Convention debated whether America should even have a standing army. ... They worried that a powerful military could rival civilian government for power in our new country, and of course they worried that having a standing army around would create too much of a temptation to use it.
One usually understands the art of the past by applying the conventions of the present thus misunderstanding the art of the past.
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.
If there's any mystery to me at all, it's probably due to the fact that I'm not online and don't go to conventions--which means that I'm probably not as accessible to fans as most writers are these days. If that makes me seem like a weird recluse, so be it.
If we grow old wisely, we lay aside the senseless forms and meaningless conventions of society and go back to a more primitive mode of social intercourse, picking our friends the way children do, - because we like them, - spending time enough with them to get some real good out of them.
Joe Biden will speak to the nation's largest gay rights group during a human rights convention on Friday. Then on Saturday, he is scheduled to speak to them again to apologize for whatever he said in Friday's speech.
Rap isn't poetry, not least because it involves music and often other elements that aren't words. But the way poets in English use things like rhyme and meter, and the ways these conventions both do and don't apply to rap we try to lay out the rules for rap, in order to understand the techniques that artists like Jay-Z and Kanye employ.
A nation that will keep people in slavery for 244 years will "thingify" them and make them things. And therefore, they will exploit them and poor people generally economically. And a nation that will exploit economically will have to have foreign investments and everything else, and it will have to use its military might to protect them. All of these problems are tied together. What I'm saying today is that we must go from this convention and say, "America, you must be born again!"
The drafters of the [Refugee Convention ] had the Cold War in mind and mainly sought to protect a few thousand dissidents from the Communist bloc. They did not envision the mass displacements of people we are seeing today.
Comics play a trite but lusty tune on the C natural keys of human nature. They rouse the most primitive, but also the most powerful, reverberations in the noisy cranial sound-box of consciousness, drowning out more subtle symphonies. Comics scorn finesse, thereby incurring the wrath of linguistic adepts. They defy the limits of accepted fact and convention, thus amortizing to apoplexy the ossified arteries of routine thought.
When you live a life devoid of ritual and convention, with honesty and self-effacement, then you are on the road to freedom.
Did you see the 2000 Republican Presidential Convention? The last time the Republicans had that many Black people on a stage, they were selling them!
Property is, after all, a social convention, an agreement about someone's exclusive right to use a thing in specified ways. However, we seem to have forgotten this. We seem to think that property belongs to us in some essential way, that it is of us. We seem to think that our property is part of ourselves, and that by owning it we therefore make ourselves more, larger, greater.
Since many people have been asking me to elaborate on why I think "Inglourious Basterds" is akin to Holocaust denial, I'll try to explain what I mean as succinctly as possible, by paraphrasing Roland Barthes: anything that makes Fascism unreal is wrong. For me, "Inglourious Basterds" makes the Holocaust harder, not easier to grasp -- as a historical reality, I mean, not as a movie convention. Insofar as it becomes a movie convention, it loses its historical reality.
It is indeed impossible to describe reality 'in itself', but that does not mean that our lives are answerable to nothing but our own conventions and commitments. They are answerable to a way of things that transcends the reach of our conceptual schemes.
I usually see the word "metafiction" applied to works that draw attention to their own devices, their own artificiality, in order to mock novelistic convention and show the impossibility of capturing a reality external to the text or whatever.
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