But what if a conviction for perjury and obstruction of justice is added to his record?
When Vick spoke in 2002, no one could have predicted what was coming: a conviction and prison time, followed by this unlikely comeback in Philadelphia.
Lula can speak with complete conviction about what a thrill it was to get his first television set and his first air-conditioner.
But with the web increasingly divided into like-minded echo chambers, it's not clear whether such a flood of factuality would inform people better or just reinforce their convictions about what a lying bunch the other lot are.
What they shared was a conviction that Judaism was defined by ethical monotheism and Messianic hope.
Too often, Mr. Clarke said, the debate over the future of coal is infected with what he called tribalism — a conviction that you are either with the mining industry, or against it.
"We're very, very concerned that despite the flimsy evidence, what they want is a conviction here and they don't care about the rights of these three Irish men," said Caitriona Ruane, an advocate for the men, who arrived here this week from Ireland.
But whether he is paying obeisance to Robert Bresson or anatomising the visceral effects of Speed, what Lane communicates is a conviction, even if it is desperate, that movies aspire to and do sometimes achieve the condition of art, and that all those billions of dollars can occasionally distil something pure, shining and true.
"We're looking for the large transactions that indicate a large level of conviction about what an insider thinks their stock is going to do," said Eric Bjorgen, a senior analyst at the firm.
"Of course there is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can't get away from the fact that Europe still is the centre of the literary world... not the United States," he said, later adding that "what I said expresses a conviction resulting from more than 10 years of assiduous labour".
