Conventional Wisdom Quotes - Page 3

• Analysts may be correct that the presidential election won't primarily turn on entitlements reform, but by choosing Paul Ryan as his running mate, Mitt Romney can, contrary to conventional wisdom, make it a winning issue and lay the foundation for a reform mandate when he wins.

  David Limbaugh

  Running, Winning, Issues

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• I think polling is important because it gives a voice to the people. It gives a quantitative, independent assessment of what the public feels as opposed to what experts or pundits think the public feels. So often it provides a quick corrective on what's thought to be the conventional wisdom about public opinion. There are any number of examples that I could give you about how wrong the experts are here in Washington, in New York and elsewhere about public opinion that are revealed by public opinion polls.

  Andrew Kohut

  Independent, Thinking, People

  Source: bigthink.com

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• Screening out peer pressure and conventional wisdom. It is so powerful, that most of us aren't even aware of how much it is influencing our decisions.

  Robert S. Kaplan

  Powerful, Decision, Peer Pressure

  Source: bobmorris.biz

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• Managers who assume that higher profits drive better working conditions may have their logic backwards. Contrary to conventional wisdom, our research identified companies in virtually every industry that are profitable because they provide good jobs.

  James O'Toole

  Logic, Assuming, Good Job

  Source: bobmorris.biz

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• In a corporate context, companies have to try very hard to oppose the enticements of conventional wisdom. They must aim for the leaps, which means that companies have to do more than simply manage their knowledge, which is composed of the insights and understandings they already know. They also have to manage the knowledge-generation process. It's not just about, "Oh, we're going to create a data warehouse and we are going to invent a computerized filing system to get at all the stuff we know."

  John Kao

  Mean, Data, Understanding

  Interview with Joel Kurtzman, www.strategy-business.com. October 1, 1996.

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• The conventional wisdom of fandom is that you must give your fans anything they want. But I've never felt that that's a healthy attitude - and that comes from being a Star Wars fan.

  DJ Shadow

  Stars, Attitude, War

  Source: pitchfork.com

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• Conventional wisdom is so scary because what if everybody's wrong?

  Kevin Costner

  Scary, What If, Ifs

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• Conventional wisdom can get us into so much trouble, especially as artists.

  Kevin Costner

  Artist, Trouble, Conventional

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• I don't view myself as a particularly intelligent people, but I do have one ability that I've demonstrated over and over again, that's helped me see things that other people for whatever reason have not seen. That's that most people see what they expect to see, what they want to see, what conventional wisdom tells them to see. I guess it could be stated that most people only hear the music, not the lyrics of human events.

  Vincent Bugliosi

  Intelligent, Views, People

  Source: www.cyinterview.com

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• Whether that's questioning the dominant opinion of the day, the conventional wisdom of the day, or whether it's questioning the policies that come out of Washington, or out of our government, generally, I think media's job is to look at it and say, "What's really going on here? What's the story behind what you see?"

  Ben Domenech

  Thinking, Opinion, Questioning

  Source: www.mtv.com

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• Well, I think it's just remarkable how wrong the conventional wisdom was. It was utterly shocking that Donald Trump won to people who live on the coasts, but to people who live in the areas that I come from, it was utterly predictable. And that suggests something really, really broken about our political culture.

  James Vance

  Thinking, People, Broken

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• You ever want to know what consensus and groupthink and conventional wisdom in Washington is, just find what David "Rodham" Gergen is saying and you'll find out what 99% of 'em are thinking.

  Rush Limbaugh

  Thinking, Consensus

  Source: www.rushlimbaugh.com

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• Skepticism requires disbelief and curiosity, not conformity to conventional wisdom. There's no science here. This is pure politics.

  Rush Limbaugh

  Curiosity, Conformity, Skepticism

  Source: www.rushlimbaugh.com

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• Congressman Steve King believed what Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi were saying, that Donald Trump had a agreed to a deal on the DREAMers and had gotten nothing on getting rid of the wall for it, and the wall was not part of the deal. He wasn't the only one. David "Rodham" Gergen, who is the definition of Washington conventional wisdom.

  Rush Limbaugh

  Wall, Dreamer, Chuck

  Source: www.rushlimbaugh.com

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• There's this message to comedians in particular, that you shouldn't write it, and a television writer should write it. And that's a prevailing conventional wisdom that I think is really wrong. That's not to say that television writers aren't great, but I think that the belief that some comedy writer's going to be able to capture your voice is naive.

  Jim Gaffigan

  Writing, Thinking, Voice

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• I think Senator [Ted] Cruz's strategy is that there's 4.5 million, 5 million Republicans that didn't vote in 2012. This is the conventional wisdom and they didn't vote because they didn't like the nominee, wasn't conservative enough, or there was a religious component. Who knows what?

  Rush Limbaugh

  Religious, Thinking, Conservative

  Source: www.realclearpolitics.com

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• I think the conventional wisdom is vastly true. There will be a huge growth in mobile, and this is something we are witnessing every day.

  Maurice Levy

  Thinking, Growth, Mobile

  Source: www.businessinsider.com

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• An expert must be BOLD if he hopes to alchemize his homespun theory into
  conventional wisdom.

  Steven Levitt

  Experts, Theory, Ifs

  Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner (2006). “Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything”, p.121, Penguin UK

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• Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed levees and exploded the conventional wisdom about a shared American prosperity, exposing a group of people so poor they didn't have $50 for a bus ticket out of town. If we want to learn something from this disaster, the lesson ought to be: America's poor deserve better than this.

  Michael Eric Dyson

  America, People, Deserve Better

  "Come Hell or High Water". Book by Michael Eric Dyson, www.today.com. 2006.

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• Around '93, '94, the conventional wisdom about the Internet was that it was a toy for academics and researchers. So it was very, very underestimated for about two years.

  Marc Andreessen

  Years, Two, Toys

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• Contemporary art challenges us.. it broadens our horizons. It asks us to think beyond the limits of conventional wisdom.

  Eli Broad

  Art, Thinking, Challenges

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• In the conventional wisdom of conservatives, the modern search for security is regularly billed as the greatest single threat to economic progress.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Progress, Modern, Economic

  John Kenneth Galbraith (1998). “The Affluent Society”, p.94, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Conventional wisdom tells us we'll only be happier after a divorce if the marriage itself was a war zone.

  Ariel Gore

  War, Divorce, Zone

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• The rules your parents teach you to live by are very different than the rules the world actually runs by. Most of the conventional wisdom is not only wrong, it's a lie told to us by people who want to control us. It doesn't help us, it helps them. Pretty much everything we're told as children (and adults, really) by the established power structures in our lives are made up fairytales us to reinforce that control: Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the tooth fairy, fat-free frozen dinners, religion, and metering lights on the highway--the list goes on

  Tucker Max

  Running, Easter, Children

  Tucker Max (2012). “Hilarity Ensues”, p.241, Simon and Schuster

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• Whats different now is that while political leaders used to give talking points to talk radio, now talk-radio hosts are giving talking points to political leaders. Its all part of the suffocating spin cycle were in. In media, politics and publishing, the conventional wisdom is to play to this base.

  John Avlon

  Media, Talking, Play

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