Follow the light of your intuition, and keep away from the darkness of convention.

Many ancient (and contemporary) societies considered the sexually awakened femaleas both auspicious and dangerous.

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...

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.

Being classy is my teenage rebellion.

The common person fears to think beyond the common.

Once she wasn’t supposed to like it. To have her in a position she didn’t like, that was power. Even if she liked it she had to pretend she didn’t. Then she was supposed to...

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...

The Bio-diversity Convention has not yielded any tangible benefits to the world’s poor.

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

One time, in New Orleans at a youth convention for my church, I read out of the phone book during a talent show. I made it all the way to ‘J’ before people started booing.

But what if, either by choice or by reluctant necessity, you end up not participating in this comforting cycle of family and continuity? What if you step out? Where do you sit at the reunion?...

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

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...

Most self-employed people remain slaves to the employed’s working hours.

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.

Art flouts convention. Convention became convention because it works.

There are going to be a lot of eyes on this year’s annual Blindfold Convention. People always want to watch what they can’t watch.

I think we’ve established a convention on the show that allows us to do pretty much anything we want to.

The raindrops gathered on my windshield like prostitutes at a political convention, and I voted like I always vote—with my windshield wiper.

Artistes, orateurs, prophètes, hommes-colosses comme Danton, hommes-enfants comme Cloots, gladiateurs et philosophes, tous allaient au même but, le progrès. Rien ne les déconcertait. La grandeur de la Convention fut de chercher la quantité de réel...

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...

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...

My religious beliefs also defied convention, leaning towards agnosticism and pandeism.

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?...

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

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...