Convention Quotes

According to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, if cows were a country, they would rank third in greenhouse gas emissions, after China and the United States. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

I never did think that my own conundrum was a matter either of science or of social convention. I thought it was a matter of the spirit, a kind of divine allegory, and that explanations of it were not very important anyway. What was important was the liberty of us all to live as we wished to live, to love however we wanted to love, and to know ourselves, however peculiar, disconcerting or unclassifiable, at one with the gods and angels. ~ Jan Morris

In the run-up to the 1992 Democratic convention, Clinton's campaign realized that voters thought the young governor had a privileged upbringing. They didn't buy his alleged concern for the middle class. ~ Dee Dee Myers

When it first emerged, Twitter was widely derided as a frivolous distraction that was mostly good for telling your friends what you had for breakfast. Now it is being used to organize and share news about the Iranian political protests, to provide customer support for large corporations, to share interesting news items, and a thousand other applications that did not occur to the founders when they dreamed up the service in 2006. This is not just a case of cultural exaptation: people finding a new use for a tool designed to do something else. In Twitter's case, the users have been redesigning the tool itself. The convention of replying to another user with the @ symbol was spontaneously invented by the Twitter user base. Early Twitter users ported over a convention from the IRC messaging platform and began grouping a topic or event by the "hash-tag" as in "#30Rock" or "inauguration." The ability to search a live stream of tweets - which is likely to prove crucial to Twitter's ultimate business model, thanks to its advertising potential - was developed by another start-up altogether. Thanks to these innovations, following a live feed of tweets about an event - political debates or Lost episodes - has become a central part of the Twitter experience. But for the first year of Twitter's existence, that mode of interaction would have been technically impossible using Twitter. It's like inventing a toaster oven and then looking around a year later and discovering that all your custo ~ Steven Johnson

Being the keynote speaker at the convention this year is an honor I don't take lightly. I know I've got some big shoes to fill. Two conventions ago, the keynote speaker was a guy named Barack Obama. ~ Julian Castro

Had to pee like a racehorse at an Iced Tea convention. ~ Stephen Colbert

If somebody's dumb enough to ask me to go to a political convention and say something, they're going to have to take what they get. ~ Clint Eastwood

Tell me one thing, Father. Suppose I hadn't been your son, suppose you just knew me, knew the same about me you know now, would you have looked forward to seeing me, to having me live under your roof?'

'Naturally, it wouldn't have been the same.'

'No. And if you had just been a fellow human and not my father, then I wouldn't have come to see you. But doesn't that mean it's nothing but a convention that binds us together? We are father and son, and so we have to show affection for each other, and if we don't we feel guilty. But why? Is there any reasonable basis for believing that affection hinges on biology? We don't feel obligated to be fond of a neighbor or a colleague, do we? ~ Kjell Askildsen

Most men's conscience, habits, and opinions are borrowed from convention and gather continually comforting assurances from the same social consensus that originally suggested them. ~ George Santayana

The world hid its head in the sands of convention, so that by seeing nothing it might avoid Truth. ~ Radclyffe Hall

I think changing the Democratic Party platform [at the convention] is a great place to start. It should include expanding Social Security, a $15 minimum wage, and breaking up too-big-to-fail banks on Wall Street - among other Sanders priorities. ~ Ben Wikler

[O]ne may properly look closely at any proposed new "freedom" from restraint or convention in order to learn what if any personal interest the advocate of the proposal has therein. Personal observation supports the statement that he who speaks for the tearing down of convention and the doing away with restraint may be one who wishes to escape the odium of some defect of his own habit or character, by having everyone else either become as he is or take his point of view. ~ J. Reuben Clark Jr.

[M]y wish is, that the Convention may adopt no temporizing expedient, but probe the defects of the Constitution [i.e., the Articles of Confederation] to the bottom, and provide radical cures. ~ George Washington

We only have one future, and it will be made of our dreams, if we have the courage to challenge convention. ~ Soichiro Honda

Criticism surprises the soul in the arms of convention. ~ George Santayana

When you live a life devoid of ritual and convention, with honesty and self-effacement, then you are on the road to freedom. ~ Frederick Lenz

Hypocrisy is the homage freedom pays to social convention. ~ Marty Rubin

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. ~ Rachel Maddow

The greatest misfortune of the wise man and the greatest unhappiness of the fool are based upon convention. ~ Franz Schubert

It is only the most elite of elite musicians whose unconventional approach becomes convention. ~ Steve Vai

Our enemies didn't adhere to the Geneva Convention. Many of my comrades were subjected to very cruel, very inhumane and degrading treatment, a few of them even unto death. But every one of us - every single one of us - knew and took great strength from the belief that we were different from our enemies, that we were better than them, that we, if the roles were reversed, would not disgrace ourselves by committing or countenancing such mistreatment of them. ~ John McCain

A convention-based approach to connecting view models to views removes the need for much boilerplate code. ~ Anonymous

I will say here and now that I have never discovered, nor can I see, any reasonable use or excuse for the " waynee, weedee, weekee " convention. It is not merely that I have a profound sympathy with one of my friends who says he just cannot believe that Caesar was the kind of man to talk in that kind of way. Caesar may, indeed, have done so, but what then ? ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

I thought this convention phenomenon was very flattering, but that's about the extent of it. ~ George Takei

What every prime minister struggles with and every leader struggles with is how to balance the two objectives; firstly that of ensuring that all asylum seekers are treated generously and humanely in accordance with the convention and secondly doing everything you can to eliminate or at least discourage people smuggling. And it's a very, very difficult balance. ~ Malcolm Turnbull

Bruce Reid is not the worst batsman there is at international level but those who are worse would not need to hire the Myer Music Bowl to hold a convention. ~ Richie Benaud

There are realities about what it is to be a woman in this world that are born from social convention. No matter how far away you are from civilization, you can't fully get away from that. ~ Jonathan E. Steinberg

We are involved in a constitution-building process of historic importance. The Convention should mark a new stage in European integration. ~ Romano Prodi

One of the most irrational of all the conventions of modern society is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected. ... [This] convention protects them, and so they proceed with their blather unwhipped and almost unmolested, to the great damage of common sense and common decency. that they should have this immunity is an outrage. There is nothing in religious ideas, as a class, to lift them above other ideas. On the contrary, they are always dubious and often quite silly. Nor is there any visible intellectual dignity in theologians. Few of them know anything that is worth knowing, and not many of them are even honest. ~ H.L. Mencken

I come at last to death and to the attitude we have toward it. On this point everything has been said and it is only proper to avoid pathos. Yet one will never be sufficiently surprised that everyone lives as if no one "knew." This is because in reality there is no experience of death. Properly speaking, nothing has been experienced but what has been lived and made conscious. Here, it is barely possible to speak of the experience of others' deaths. It is a substitute, an illusion, and it never quite convinces us. That melancholy convention cannot be persuasive. ~ Albert Camus

You must renounce all superficiality, all convention, all vanity and delusion. ~ Gustav Mahler

We die to each other daily. What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then. To pretend that they and we are the same is a useful and convenient social convention which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember that at every meeting we are meeting a stranger. ~ T. S. Eliot

During elections for the 1776 convention to frame a constitution for Pennsylvania, a Privates Committee urged voters to oppose great and overgrown rich men ... they will be too apt to be framing distinctions in society. ~ Howard Zinn

A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention. ~ Aldous Huxley

The usage seems first to have made its appearance on the floor of the Convention in the context of insults. In February the deputy Thomas used the familiar form to rebuke Marat for one of his outbursts: "Shut up, you imbecile! ~ Timothy Tackett

It's always interesting - how do you actually convey thought through song? We're used to the convention on stage. In film, we used to be used to it, and now sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. You need to be fresh and really look at the material. ~ Hugh Jackman

It is the popular misconception of marriage as a mere social convention or quaint tradition invented by the brain of man which has led to the denigrating of this holy relation, the multiplication of unspeakable immorality, the common unrest between husbands and wives, and the gradual disintegration of society and civilization. For if marriage exists merely by human authority then men and women may do with it or conduct themselves in it as they please. They may redefine it, or they may abandon it altogether. But if marriage is a divine institution, then it is governed by a higher authority. It becomes, then, a matter of obedience, and the conduct of husbands and wives within marriage is a conduct for which they must give their account to God. The original institution of marriage is therefore basic to our understanding of marriage, our estimation of marriage, and our right behavior in marriage. ~ Rosaria Champagne Butterfield

For many years I have advocated 'redesigning Parliament' in a variety of ways - elect the Senate, do away with the 'confidence convention,' permit freer voting, strengthen the role of back benchers and committees, do away with ineffectual 'take note' debates, restructure question period, and so on. ~ Preston Manning

The metaphor of the king as the shepherd of his people goes back to ancient Egypt. Perhaps the use of this particular convention is due to the fact that, being stupid, affectionate, gregarious, and easily stampeded, the societies formed by sheep are most like human ones. ~ Northrop Frye

There was not a member of the Constitutional Convention who had the least objection to what is contended for by the advocates for a Bill of Rights and trial by jury. ~ George Washington

I'm creative because I did an icon navigation while everyone else on the planet sticks to words? No, it just means I didn't want to stick to convention. If anything you can call it rebellious but certainly not creative. ~ Paul Scriven

I had been a girl of whom certain things were expected, none of them too bad: a career as a nurse, for example; a sense of duty to my parents; obedience to the law and worship of convention. But in one year of being away from home, that girl had gone out of existence. ~ Jamaica Kincaid

When a Cabinet Minister who is sacked for telling lies is re-appointed, in the face of every constitutional convention, only for the same man to be sacked again from the same Cabinet for the same offence by the same Prime Minister no wonder the public are cynical about politics. ~ William Hague

[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

Who on earth invented the silly convention that it is boring or impolite to talk shop? Nothing is more interesting to listen to, especially if the shop is not one's own. ~ W. H. Auden

The idols of modern culture have had a profound influence on the shape of our work today. In traditional societies people found their meaning and sense of value by submitting their interests and sacrificing their desires to serve higher causes like God, family, and other people. In modern societies there is often no higher cause than individual interests and desires. This shift powerfully changed the role of work in people's lives - it now became the way we defined ourselves. Traditional cultures tended to see people's place on the social ladder as assigned by nature or convention, each family having its "proper place." That view had put too little stock in the role of individual talent, ambition, and hard work for determining the outcome of one's life. But modern society responded by putting too much stock in the autonomous person. ~ Timothy Keller

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. ~ Jimmy Fallon

Long ago one of the Cynic philosophers strutted through the streets of Athens in a torn mantle to make himself admired by everyone by displaying his contempt for convention. One day Socrates met him and said: 'I see your vanity through the hole in your mantle.' Your dirt too, sir, is vanity, and your vanity is dirty. ~ Milan Kundera

Nonetheless, Article 5 makes clear that if an Iraqi civilian who is not a member of the armed forces, has engaged in attacks on Coalition forces, the Geneva Convention permits the use of more coercive interrogation approaches to prevent future attacks. ~ John Yoo

If we say the Geneva Convention is obsolete, then what do others who have our soldiers say? ~ Chuck Schumer

Convention, so often a mask for injustice ... ~ Edith Hamilton

I've been a Republican since age 13, when we got our first television set, and I saw the Republican National Convention on television. And President Eisenhower was talking about personal responsibility, about opening the door for opportunity and that people could really take care of themselves without a lot of government intrusions. ~ Lionel Sosa

I'm not the kind of girl who spends hours getting ready. I don't blow dry my hair. And I hate make up. I'm not pretty. And I don't want to be. I am passionate and restless and wild. I'm exhausted by prudent ideologies. I'm not inferior because of my lack of convention. I'm as strong as I am broken. I'm tired of having my sexuality mistaken for an invitation. I will sweat and I will run. I will let the rain come down on me. I want to feel life as I am. I don't want to skate through having my immoderation controlled by weak judgements. By fear.

I don't want to be who I'm supposed to be, I want to be who I am. ~ Jacqueline Simon Gunn

I always thought it'd be fun to go to a sci-fi convention, watch a bunch of Klingons walking around, all of that kind of stuff. ~ Michael Welch

So between that blogger in the convention office and the panel, I'm in a pretty terrible mood. I can't believe I ran into the Rebelgunner blogger. And it was a girl. Fate must be trolling me. Not even seeing Nathan Fillion will help this dark cloud over my head. ~ Ashley Poston

Courting is always difficult when the one being courted has an elderly female relative in the house; they tend to mutter or cackle or bum cigarettes or, in the worst cases, get out the family photograph album, an act of aggression in the sex war which ought to be banned by a Geneva Convention. ~ Terry Pratchett

I have more folds than an origami convention. ~ Roscoe Arbuckle

The most curious social convention of the great age in which we live is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected. ~ H.L. Mencken

2004 was a great year for Boston! The Patriots won the Super Bowl! Boston hosted its first national political convention! And - the Red Sox won the World Series! ~ Thomas Menino

Decadence, decadence, he said to himself. They've lost everything and gained nothing. The French had merely daubed on the finishing touches at the end of a process which had begun five hundred years ago, at least. Their intuitive moral desires coincided with the ideals embodied in the formulas of their religion, yet they could live in accordance neither with those deepest impulses nor with the precepts of the religion, because society came in between with all the pressure of its tradition. No one could afford to be honest or generous or merciful because every one of them distrusted all the others; often they had more confidence in a Christian they were meeting for the first time than in a Moslem they had known for years. ~ Paul Bowles

I cannot accept this invitation [to celebrate the bicentenial of the Constitution], for I do not believe that the meaning of the Constitution was forever 'fixed' at the Philadelphia Convention ... To the contrary, the government they devised was defective from the start. [Progressive] ~ Thurgood Marshall

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 1 in the primer of minor poetry. ~ G.K. Chesterton

All Beyoncé and JLo have done is add to the laundry list of attributes women must have to qualify as beautiful. ~ Tina Fey

Because I was moved by the sorry spectacle of a conventional young man thinking that he had become radically unconventional. ~ Vera Caspary

In 1987, the United States celebrates the bicentennial anniversary of the constitutional convention that provided the basic rules for the American political order. This convention was one of the very few historical examples in which political rules were deliberately chosen. ~ James M. Buchanan

Deception, flattering, lying, deluding, talking behind the back, putting up a false front, living in borrowed splendor, wearing a mask, hiding behind convention, playing a role for others and for oneself
in short, a continuous fluttering around the solitary flame of vanity
is so much the rule and the law among men that there is almost nothing which is less comprehensible than how an honest and pure drive for truth could have arisen among them. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Dragon breeding was outlawed by the Warlocks' Convention of 1709, everyone knows that. It's hard to stop Muggles from noticing us if we're keeping dragons in the back garden- anyway, you can't tame dragons. It's dangerous. You should see the burns Charlie's got off wild ones in Romania."
"But there aren't wild dragons in Britain?" said Harry.
"Of course there are," said Ron. "Common Welsh Green and Hebridean Blacks. The Ministry of Magic has a job hushing them up, I can tell you. Our kind have to keep putting spells on Muggles who've spotted them, to make them forget. ~ J.K. Rowling

There's a convention that one doesn't speak ill of the dead. That's stupid, I think. The truth's always the truth. On the whole it's better to keep your mouth shut about living people. You might conceivably injure them. The dead are past that. But the harm they've done lives after them sometimes. ~ Agatha Christie

A lot of senators are so worried about convention and how they look that they wouldn't let their hair down if they had any. ~ Ben Nighthorse Campbell

Ever since Romanticism, an oppositional mode, artists have the right, and indeed the duty, to attack social convention. But it is ridiculous and in fact self-infantilizing for them to expect to be financially supported by the general public whom they are insulting. ~ Camille Paglia

I, too, like yourself was a good party man: my party was that of the Church; I was ultramontane. Your party system is one of your thefts from our Church; your National Convention is our Ecunemic Council; you abdicate reason, as we do, before its decisions; and you yourself Mr. Ratcliffe, you are a Cardinal. ~ Henry Adams

In pulp fiction it is a rigid convention that the hero's shoulders and the heroine's balcon constantly threaten to burst their bonds, a possibility which keeps the audience in a state of tense expectancy. Unfortunately for the fans, however, recent tests reveal that the wisp of chiffon which stands between the publisher and the postal laws has the tensile strength of drop-forged steel. ~ S.J Perelman

A short exposure to the convention convinced me that the Internet may save the Democracy in that it is a way for the people, for the citizens, to have some direct influence on the government. ~ John Jay Hooker

The elks live up in the hills and in the spring they come down for their annual convention. It is very interesting to watch them come down to the water hole. And you should see them run when they find that it's only a water hole. What they're looking for is elk-ohole. ~ Morrie Ryskind

for those to whom Lynne Truss is a hero, everything from spelling convention to word choice to logic is, somehow, "grammar." And ~ Robert Lane Greene

What had amazed him, what amazed him still, even after all these years, was how quickly he'd stepped out of himself. He'd slipped off every convention and moral that had defined him, a great cowl that fell to the floor with the unfastening of a single closure. The person beneath it was someone he barely recognized. ~ Lisa Unger

Art flouts convention. Convention became convention because it works. ~ Stewart Brand

The Constitution is ... the greatest single effort of national deliberation that the world has ever seen ~ John Adams

Our ancient sources of wisdom call on human beings to rise to their highest capacity and behave in extraordinarily open and generous ways to one another, under difficult circumstances to transcend differences and create understanding across all barriers of convention and fear. This wisdom is fragile as our environment is fragile, threatened by an overwhelming material culture. I believe in a spiritual ecology. In today's world, Judaism and Tibetan Buddhism and other wisdom traditions are endangered species. ~ Rodger Kamenetz

The musical scale is a convention which circumscribes the area of potentiality and permits construction within those limits in its own particular symmetry. ~ Iannis Xenakis

In 1980, I watched my first Republican convention with my grandfather. ~ Marco Rubio

What is it, in the end, that induces a man to go his own way and to rise out of unconscious identity with the mass as out of a swathing mist? Not necessity, for necessity comes to many, and they all take refuge in convention. Not moral decision, for nine times out of ten we decide for convention likewise.

What is it, then, that inexorably tips the scales in favour of the extra-ordinary? It is what is commonly called vocation: an irrational factor that destines a man to emancipate himself from the herd and from it's well-worn paths. True personality is always a vocation and puts its trust in it as God, despite its being, as the ordinary man would say, only a personal feeling. But vocation acts like a law of God from which there is no escape. The fact that many a man who goes his own way ends in ruin means nothing to one who has a vocation. He must obey his own law, as if it were a daemon whispering to him of new and wonderful paths. Anyone with a vocation hears the voice of the inner man: he is called….

The original meaning of "to have a vocation" is "to be addressed by a voice." The clearest examples of this are to be found in the avowals of the Old Testament prophets. That it is not just a quaint old-fashioned way of speaking is proved by the confessions of historical personalities such as Goethe and Napolean, to mention only two familiar examples, who made no secret of their feeling of vocation. ~ C.G. Jung

Convention was our safeguard: could one have stronger? ~ Elizabeth Bowen

My first Comic-Con was when I first met Joss Whedon: He introduced me to that world and I'd never been to a convention before that. He and a bunch of the 'Buffy' and 'Angel' writers were all going down in a big van and he invited me along. ~ Nathan Fillion

Whatever your resources, the world was yours to the exact degree to which you summoned the fortitude and faith to step away from convention and orthodoxy and invent your own life. Tay ~ Bob Shacochis

The spontaneity of slaps is sincerity, whereas the ceremonial of caresses is largely convention. ~ Ugo Betti

Prior to modern times, the term 'Islamic' (Islami in Arabic) was almost never used to define the provenance, status, or substance of things. There was no such thing as 'Islamic art', 'Islamic economics', or even 'Islamic law.' ... The encounter with the modern West, however, ultimately changed the status of 'Islamic.' Inasmuch as the rise of the West converted the achievements of Darwin, Descartes, and Hegel from mere English, French, or German achievements into explicitly 'Western' ones, it also engendered the need for a parallel convention for demarcating the non-Western 'other.' The Western provenance of the modern neologism 'Islamic' is perhaps best revealed in its tendency to connote geography and ethnicity. 'Islamic', in other words, connotes not simply that which is related to or a product of Islam as a religion but that which relates to a particularly non-European people in a non-European part of the world. In this capacity, it carries both a descriptive and a prescriptive force... For no modern Muslim nor non-Muslim would include the likes of such Arab Christians as Michel Aflaq or San' Allah Ibrahim among the 'thinkers of Islam.' Rather, in Western parlance, the modern 'Islamic' began as an instrument to demarcate the boundary between the west and a particular set of 'others.' In Muslim hands, it would go on to evolve into a full-blown signifier of normative Islam and a tool for delineating the boundary between it and Islam. Its added utility, moreover, as a mechani ~ Sherman A. Jackson

A blanket could be used to make people smile. But the blanket won't make just anyone smile - it will make people with no mouths smile. I plan on showing a live audience how it works at the next Helen Keller Convention. ~ Jarod Kintz

I know animals more gallant than the African warthog, but none more courageous. He is the peasant of the plains - the drab and dowdy digger in the earth. He is the uncomely but intrepid defender of family, home, and bourgeois convention, and he will fight anything of any size that intrudes upon his smug existence ... His eyes are small and lightless and capable of but one expression - suspicion. What he does not understand, he suspects, and what he suspects, he fights. ~ Beryl Markham

Murder was deeply human. A person was killed and a person killed. And what powered the final thrust wasn't a whim, wasn't an event. It was an emotion. Something once healthy and human had become wretched and bloated and finally buried. But not put to rest. It lay there, often for decades, feeding on itself, growing and gnawing, grim and full of grievance. Until it finally broke free of all human restraint. Not conscience, not fear, not social convention could contain it. When that happened, all hell broke loose. And a man became a monster. ~ Louise Penny

Eventually my rejection of authority spilled into self-indulgence and self-destructiveness, and by the time I enrolled in college, I'd begun to see how any challenge to convention harbored within it the possibility of its own excesses and its own orthodoxy. I started to reexamine my assumptions, and recalled the values my mother and grandparents had taught me. In this slow, fitful process of sorting out what I believed, I began silently registering the point in dorm-room conversations when my college friends and I stopped thinking and slipped into can't: the point at which the denunciations of capitalism or American imperialism came too easily, and the freedom from the constraints of monogamy or religion was proclaimed without fully understanding the value of such constraints, and the role of victim was too readily embraced as a means of shedding responsibility, or asserting entitlement, or claiming moral superiority over those not so victimized. ~ Barack Obama

[T]he Constitution ought to be the standard of construction for the laws, and that wherever there is an evident opposition, the laws ought to give place to the Constitution. But this doctrine is not deducible from any circumstance peculiar to the plan of convention, but from the general theory of a limited Constitution. ~ Alexander Hamilton

only by believing in and looking for secrets could you see beyond the convention to an opportunity hidden in plain sight. ~ Peter Thiel

Suppose the word mountain meant metaphor, and dog, and Bible, and the United States. Clearly, if a word meant everything, it would mean nothing. If, now, the law of contradiction is an arbitrary convention, and if our linguistic theorists choose some other convention, I challenge them to write a book in conformity with their principles. As a matter of fact it will not be hard for them to do so. Nothing more is necessary than to write the word metaphor sixty thousand times: Metaphor metaphor metaphor metaphor ... . This means the dog ran up the mountain, for the word metaphor means dog, ran, and mountain. Unfortunately, the sentence "metaphor metaphor metaphor" also means, Next Christmas is Thanksgiving, for the word metaphor has these meanings as well. ~ Gordon H. Clark

People always feel sorry for you if you're physically sick. It doesn't matter if you have cancer or a cold. People always feel sorry for you and ask you if you're okay. You need money? You got it! You want to meet a celebrity? Of course you can! You want to go to a convention, ComiCon, Disney World, anywhere in the world? You're going to go there.

That doesn't happen when you're mentally ill.

If you're mentally ill, people look at you differently. People roll their eyes when you talk about how sad you are. People won't lift a finger to help you. "Get a job," they'll tell you. "Stop being so lazy. Be grateful you don't have cancer. Get over it. It's in the past. You have no reason to be sad."

And that isn't how it works.

But, of course, they wouldn't know that.

They've never been mentally ill, they don't know how you can be so permanently damaged by your past that your present is painful and your future looks bleak. They don't understand that most days getting out of bed is a chore. They don't get that sometimes getting a job is out of the question because you're just too damn afraid to even speak to anyone.

That isn't something you can just get over.

But no one knows that because mental illnesses aren't a real problem apparently.

Apparently, the fact that over 800,000 million people die from suicide each year isn't a real problem. Apparently, the fact that 15% of the adolescent population ~ Annie Ortiz

The world looks with some awe upon a man who appears unconcernedly indifferent to home, money, comfort, rank, or even power and fame. The world feels not without a certain apprehension, that here is someone outside its jurisdiction; someone before whom its allurements may be spread in vain; some one strangely enfranchised, untamed, untrammelled by convention, moving independent of the ordinary currents of human action. ~ Winston Churchill

There is nothing sacred about convention; there is nothing sacred about primitive passions or whims; but the fact that a convention exists indicates that a way of living has been devised capable of maintaining itself. ~ George Santayana

It was over, the awkward moment, the dreaded moment, sliding past in a ripple of commonplaces, the easy mechanical politenesses that are so much more than empty convention; they are the greaves and cuirasses that arm the naked nerve. ~ Mary Stewart

We must institute a coup d'etat, a third revolution, which must beat down anarchy. Dissolve the Paris Commune and destroy its sections! Dissolve the clubs, which preach disorder and equality! Close the Jacobin Club and seal up its papers! ... The triumvirate of Robespierre, Danton and Marat, all the 'levellers', all the anarchists. Then a new Convention will be elected. ~ Jacques Pierre Brissot

I dont like doing whats expected. Ive always done best when Ive listened to my instincts rather than following convention or doing what other people think I should do. ~ Shawn Colvin