Conventional Fire Alarm

Famous quotes containing the words conventional, fire and/or alarm:

    No one who has lived even for a fleeting moment for something other than life in its conventional sense and has experienced the exaltation that this feeling produces can then renounce his new freedom so easily.
    André Breton (1896–1966)

    A young person is a person with nothing to learn
    One who already knows that ice does not chill and fire does not burn . . .
    It knows it can spend six hours in the sun on its first
    day at the beach without ending up a skinless beet,
    And it knows it can walk barefoot through the barn
    without running a nail in its feet. . . .
    Meanwhile psychologists grow rich
    Writing that the young are ones’ should not
    undermine the self-confidence of which.
    Ogden Nash (1902–1971)

    Generally speaking, the political news, whether domestic or foreign, might be written today for the next ten years with sufficient accuracy. Most revolutions in society have not power to interest, still less alarm us; but tell me that our rivers are drying up, or the genus pine dying out in the country, and I might attend.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)