Famous quotes containing the words general, convention and/or held:
“It has been the struggle between privileged men who have managed to get hold of the levers of power and the people in general with their vague and changing aspirations for equality, for justice, for some kind of gentler brotherhood and peace, which has kept that balance of forces we call our system of government in equilibrium.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“No convention gets to be a convention at all except by grace of a lot of clever and powerful people first inventing it, and then imposing it on others. You can be pretty sure, if you are strictly conventional, that you are following genius—a long way off. And unless you are a genius yourself, that is a good thing to do.”
—Katharine Fullerton Gerould (1879–1944)
“The earth is not earth but a stone,
Not the mother that held men as they fell
But stone, but like a stone, no: not
The mother, but an oppressor, but like
An oppressor that grudges them their death,
As it grudges the living that they live.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)