Conventional Quotes - Page 7

• There are contingency plans in the NATO doctrine to fire a nuclear weapon for demonstrative purposes, to demonstrate to the other side that they are exceeding the limits of toleration in the conventional area.

  Alexander Haig

  Power, Fire, Doctrine

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• I wanted to say something different: the pictures are also a leave-taking, in several respects. Factually: these specific persons are dead; as a general statement, death is leave-taking. And then ideologically: a leave-taking from a specific doctrine of salvation and, beyond that, from the illusion that unacceptable circumstances of life can be changed by this conventional expedient of violent struggle.

  Gerhard Richter

  Art, Struggle, Different

  Gerhard Richter, Dietmar Elger, Hans-Ulrich Obrist (2009). “Gerhard Richter: writings 1961-2007”, Distributed Art Pub Inc

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• Conventional words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously only in a second stage, where the associative play already referred to is sufficiently established and can be reproduced at will.

  Albert Einstein

  Play, Stage

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• Obama is very much an establishment sort of guy. The whole image of him as a transcendent figure was based on style rather than substance. If you actually looked at what he said, not how he said it, he said very establishment things. He's a moderate, cautious, ameliorative guy. He tends to gravitate toward Beltway conventional wisdom.

  Paul Krugman

  Guy, Style, Substance

  "Playboy Interview: Paul Krugman". Interview with Jonathan Tasini, www.playboy.com. February 15, 2012.

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• I came into history from a primary concern with mathematics and science. This has been a tremendous help to me as a person and as a historian, although it must be admitted it has served to make my historical interpretations less conventional than may be acceptable of many of my colleagues in the field.

  Carroll Quigley

  Historical, May, Fields

  Carroll Quigley (1979). “The evolution of civilizations: an introduction to historical analysis”, Liberty Fund Inc.

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• I've always felt very sympathetic from the first days of writing about women that, whatever the woman, whether she is trying to be a woman in the conventional sense or breaking the boundaries, those struggles are quite difficult.

  Susie Orbach

  Struggle, Writing, Trying

  Interview with Decca Aitkenhead, www.theguardian.com. May 10, 2009.

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• I think there's an awful lot of noise about the Church being persecuted but there is a more real issue that the conventional churches face - that the people who are really driving their revival and success believe in an old-time religion which, in my view, is incompatible with a modern, multi-ethnic, multicultural society.

  Trevor Phillips

  Real, Believe, Thinking

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• I usually have an immediate recognition of the potential image, and I have found that too much concern about matters such as conventional composition may take the edge off the first inclusive reaction.

  Ansel Adams

  Firsts, May, Matter

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• When I was growing up, I would try to sing out of key very consciously. I was probably afraid of trying too hard to do something beautiful, and then I just wasn't good enough. But I've learned that I was also on the outside - wanting more challenge by living in that more conventional world.

  Jenny Hval

  Beautiful, Growing Up, Keys

  "Jenny Hval's Soft Dick Rock". Interview with Jenn Pelly, pitchfork.com. June 15, 2015.

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• Thought and beauty, like a hurricane or waves, should not know conventional, delimited forms.

  Anton Chekhov

  Hurricanes, Wave, Form

  "The Letter". Short story by Anton Chekhov, 1887.

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• Fear is a problem with film music and films; people want to be conventional, and there's more commercialism today. If you are not daring in your art, you're bankrupt.

  Alex North

  Art, People, Film Music

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• [E]volutionists sometimes take as haughty an attitude toward the next level up the conventional ladder of disciplines: the human sciences. They decry the supposed atheoretical particularism of their anthropological colleagues and argue that all would be well if only the students of humanity regarded their subject as yet another animal and therefore yielded explanatory control to evolutionary biologists.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Attitude, Animal, Discipline

  Stephen Jay Gould (2010). “An Urchin in the Storm: Essays about Books and Ideas”, p.64, W. W. Norton & Company

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• [In natural history,] great discovery often requires a map to a hidden mine filled with gems then easily gathered by conventional tools, not a shiny new space-age machine for penetrating previously inaccessible worlds.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Space, Discovery, Age

  Stephen Jay Gould (2011). “The Lying Stones of Marrakech”, p.318, Harvard University Press

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• Perhaps randomness is not merely an adequate description for complex causes that we cannot specify. Perhaps the world really works this way, and many events are uncaused in any conventional sense of the word. Perhaps our gut feeling that it cannot be so reflects only our hopes and prejudices, our desperate striving to make sense of a complex and confusing world, and not the ways of nature.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Feelings, Confusing, World

  "Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes". Book by Stephen Jay Gould. "Chance Riches", p. 342, 1983.

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• The intricate and different life cycles of both male and female root-heads, and the great behavioral sophistication shown by the female in reconfiguring a host crab as a support system, all underscore the myopia of our conventional wisdom in regarding rhizocephalans as degenerate parasites because the adult anatomy of internal roots and external sac seem so simple.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Simple, Roots, Support Systems

  Stephen Jay Gould (2011). “Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms”, p.371, Harvard University Press

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• The Adlerians, in the name of "individual psychology," take the side of society against the individual. ... Adler's later thought succumbs to the worst of his earlier banalization. It is conventional, practical, and moralistic. "Our science ... is based on common sense." Common sense, the half-truths of a deceitful society, is honored as the honest truths of a frank world.

  Alfred Adler

  Names, Common Sense, Psychology

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• The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you’ve not fooled yourself, it’s easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.

  Richard P. Feynman

  Principles, Way, Fool

  Richard P Feynman (2014). “Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman: Adventures of a Curious Character as Told to Ralph Leighton”, p.343, Random House

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• We cherish the conventional story of Dr. King and nonviolence, in fact, precisely because that narrative demands so little of us…This conventional narrative is soothing, moving, and politically acceptable, and has only the disadvantage of bearing no resemblance to what actually happened.

  Timothy B. Tyson

  Kings, Moving, Demand

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• Ourselves are cosmic and capacious beyond conjecture, and to experience some notion of the planetary perspective is the richest income from travelling. It takes all to inform and educate all. Sallies forth from our cramped firesides into other homes, other hearts, are wonderfully wholesome and enlarging. Travel opens prospects on all sides, widens our horizon, liberates the mind from geographical and conventional limitations, from local prejudices and national, showing the globe in its differing climates, zones, and latitudes of intelligence.

  Amos Bronson Alcott

  Home, Heart, Perspective

  Amos Bronson Alcott (1877). “Table-talk”

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• If the artist succeeds in producing the impression of a movement which takes several moments for accomplishment, his work is certainly much less conventional than the scientific image, where time is abruptly suspended.

  Auguste Rodin

  Artist, Accomplishment, Movement

  Auguste Rodin, Paul Gsell (1983). “Rodin on Art and Artists: Conversations with Paul Gsell”, p.34, Courier Corporation

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• Artists love to immerse themselves in chaos in order to put it into form, just as God created form out of chaos in Genesis. Forever unsatisfied with the mundane, the apathetic, the conventional, they always push on to newer worlds.

  Rollo May

  Artist, Order, Forever

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• Oils of cinnamon and eucalyptus are as powerful against some microorganisms as conventional antibiotics, and are especially effective against flus. Sandalwood oil from Mysore, India, is not only a classic perfume oil but is also a traditional remedy for sore throats and laryngitis. Lavender oil, so often used in toilet waters and scented sachets, has a dramatic healing action on burns.

  Robert Tisserand

  Powerful, Healing, Oil

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• I love conventional apocalypse movies. In movies, I like to be with the President, or the scientist trying to solve the problem, but that's not the kind of fiction that I like to read.

  Karen Thompson Walker

  Trying, President, Fiction

  "The Age of Miracles". Interview with Mark Medley, nationalpost.com. July 13, 2012.

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• The most conventional statements are both true and welcome.

  Judith Martin

  Women, Welcome, Statements

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• Conventional cancer therapy is so toxic and dehumanizing that I fear it far more than I fear death from cancer.

  Julian Whitaker

  Cancer, Toxic, Fear Of Death

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