Just as every conviction begins as a whim so does every emancipator serve his apprenticeship as a crank. A fanatic is a great leader who is just entering the room.

-Broun, (Matthew) Heywood Campbell
  In NewYork World, 6 Feb.

Never lay yourselfopentowhat iscalled conviction: you might as well open your waist-coat to receive a knock- down blow.

-Hunt, (James Henry) Leigh
  'Rules for the Conduct of Newspaper Editors', in The Examiner, 6 Mar.

No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes, than a public library.

-Johnson, Samuel known as Dr Johnson
^2  In The Rambler.

The deepest thing I know is that I am living and dying at once, and my conviction is to report that dialogue.

-Kunitz, StanleyJasspon
  In the NewYork Times,11 Mar.

   I cannot give any scientist of anyage better advice than this: the intensityof a conviction that a hypothesisistrue has no bearing over whether it is true or not.

-Medawar, Sir Peter Brian
  Advice to aYoung Scientist.

The author's conviction on this day of New Year is that music begins to atrophy when it departs toofar from the dance; that poetry beginsto atrophy when it getstoo far from music . . .

-Pound, Ezra Loomis
  TheABC of Reading,'Warning'.

He may be more potent than any other man. The damnable iteration dayafter day of earnest conviction wears like the dropping of the water upon the stone.

-Stead,WilliamThomas
  Of the journalist.'Government by journalism', in the Contemporary Review, May. Collected in A Journalist on Journalism (1892).

Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. SeeAchebe 2:18.

-Yeats,W(illiam) B(utler)
  'The Second Coming', l.1^8. Collected in Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921).