Conventional Quotes - Page 10

• The most important aspect of my personality as far as determining my success goes; has been my questioning conventional wisdom, doubting experts and questioning authority. While that can be painful in your relationships with your parents and teachers, it's enormously useful in life.

  Larry Ellison

  Inspirational, Teacher, Personality

  "Prophet of Software". The Academy of Achievement Interview, www.achievement.org. May 22, 1997.

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• The real scientific study of the distribution of wealth has, we must confess, scarcely begun. The conventional academic study of the so-called theory of distribution into rent, interest, wages, and profits is only remotely related to the subject. This subject, the causes and cures for the actual distribution of capital and income among real persons, is one of the many now in need of our best efforts as scientific students of society.

  Irving Fisher

  Real, Best Effort, Income

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• Going down on a woman gives me a stiff neck, going down on a man gives me lockjaw and conventional sex gives me claustrophobia.

  Tallulah Bankhead

  Sex, Men, Giving

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• I guess what I want to say to us artists and entrepreneurs is that conventional yardsticks of success don't apply to all enterprises. Labors of love count.

  Steven Pressfield

  Artist, Entrepreneur, Want

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• A damnably readable, streamlined, yet deeply researched work. Skipping the ancestors and aftermath of conventional biography, Max gives us the man, his work, and his times-the niceties of which (so complicated, so exquisitely intertwined) Max articulates with, well, Wallace-like lucidity and wit. Above all this is the story of a touching young man who insisted on being something better than simply the smartest person in the room.

  Blake Bailey

  Men, Giving, Touching

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• The facts of science are real enough, and so are the techniques that scientists use, and so are the technologies based on them. But the belief system that governs conventional scientific thinking is an act of faith.

  Rupert Sheldrake

  Real, Technology, Thinking

  Rupert Sheldrake (2012). “Science Set Free: 10 Paths to New Discovery”, p.7, Deepak Chopra

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• Contrary to popular belief, conventional wisdom would have one believe that it is insane to resist this, the mightiest of empires… But what history really shows is that today`s empire is tomorrow`s ashes, that nothing lasts forever, and that to not resist is to acquiesce in your own oppression. The greatest form of sanity that anyone can exercise is to resist that force that is trying to repress, oppress, and fight down the human spirit.

  Mumia Abu-Jamal

  Believe, Fighting, Exercise

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• The use of [the atomic bombs] at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons... The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.

  William D. Leahy

  Fashion, Children, War

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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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• Higher education is the place where people who had big plans in high school get stuck in fierce rivalries with equally smart peers over conventional careers like management consulting and investment banking. For the privilege of being turned into conformists, students (or their families) pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in skyrocketing tuition that continues to outpace inflation. Why are we doing this to ourselves?

  Peter Thiel

  Smart, School, Careers

  Peter Thiel, Blake Masters (2014). “Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future”, p.31, Crown Business

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• His musical inspiration operates in a world uncluttered by conventional bar lines, conventional chord changes, and conventional ways of blowing or fingering a saxophone. Such practical 'limitations' did not even have to be overcome in his music; they somehow never existed for him. Despite this - or more accurately, because of this - his playing has a deep inner logic. Not an obvious surface logic, it is based on subtleties of reaction, subtleties of timing and color that are, I think, quite new to jazz - at least they have never appeared in so pure and direct a form.

  Gunther Schuller

  Inspiration, Thinking, Color

  "All American Music: Composition in the Late Twentieth Century". Book by John Rockwell, 1983.

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• I propose getting rid of conventional armaments and replacing them with reasonably priced hydrogen bombs that will be distributed equally throughout the world.

  Idi Amin

  Hydrogen Bomb, Political, Bombs

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• I wish I could attribute the absence of any conventional Arab offensive in the last 20 years to a change of political climate or a willingness to abide by past accords. But unfortunately it is more likely that the Egyptians or Syrians concluded that the next time their tanks headed to Tel Aviv, there was nothing stopping the counterassaults from ending up in downtown Cairo or Damascus.

  Victor Davis Hanson

  Past, Years, Political

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• No one is more conventional than a woman who is falling out of love.

  Francoise Sagan

  Falling In Love, Fall

  "Those Without Shadows". Book by Françoise Sagan, 1957.

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• A language possesses utility only insofar as it can construct conventional boundaries. A language of no boundaries is no language at all, and thus the mystic who tries to speak logically and formally of unity consciousness is doomed to sound very paradoxical or contradictory. The problem is that the structure of any language cannot grasp the nature of unity consciousness, any more than a fork could grasp the ocean.

  Ken Wilber

  Ocean, Unity, Trying

  Ken Wilber (2001). “No Boundary: Eastern and Western Approaches to Personal Growth”, p.52, Shambhala Publications

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• Conventional economics is a form of brain damage.

  David Suzuki

  Brain, Damage, Economics

  "David Suzuki and Jeff Rubin form an unlikely alliance" by Monique Beaudin, montrealgazette.com. November 4, 2012.

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• Take a brilliant, creative social scientist, without any respect for conventional wisdom and you get Ellen Langer. She is a fantastic storyteller, and Counterclockwise is a fascinating story about the unexpected ways in which our minds and bodies are connected.

  Dan Ariely

  Creative, Mind, Stories

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• The conventional wisdom in our business is that you have to grow and keep moving to survive.  We never grew, always stayed tiny, and it serves us very well over the years, allowing us to pick and choose projects, and keeping our financial independence from our clients.  We actually have a rather good track record, because we do select projects carefully. Most of our ideas don't eat dust but glimpse the light of day because we find it much more helpful to spend some serious time and effort before we start working on a project, rather than suffer through it afterwards.

  Stefan Sagmeister

  Moving, Dust, Years

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• Organic is something we can all partake of and benefit from. When we demand organic, we are demanding poison-free food. We are demanding clean air. We are demanding pure, fresh water. We are demanding soil that is free to do its job and seeds that are free of toxins. We are demanding that our children be protected from harm. We all need to bite the bullet and do what needs to be done—buy organic whenever we can, insist on organic, fight for organic and work to make it the norm. We must make organic the conventional choice and not the exception available only to the rich and educated.

  Maria Rodale

  Jobs, Children, Fighting

  Maria Rodale (2010). “Organic Manifesto: How Organic Farming Can Heal Our Planet, Feed the World, and Keep Us Safe”, p.192, Rodale

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• Horror need not always be a long-fanged gentleman in evening clothes or a dismembered corpse or a doctor who keeps a brain in his gold fish bowl. It may be a warm sunny day, the innocence of girlhood and hints of unexplored sexuality that combine to produce a euphoria so intense it becomes transporting, a state beyond life or death. Such horror is unspeakable not because it is gruesome but because it remains outside the realm of things that can be easily defined or explained in conventional ways.

  Vincent Canby

  Clothes, Doctors, Long

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• You see, I am a very conventional scientist, really.

  Martin Fleischmann

  Scientist

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• Poland is one of the few countries that can afford to conduct a conventional monetary policy and that means we have to act against the buildup of imbalances in the economy.

  Marek Belka

  Country, Mean, Imbalance

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• Conventional wisdom is no wisdom at all. Conventional wisdom is taking somebody else's word for the way things are It's the followers of this world who rely on assumption. Not the leaders.

  Richard Marcinko

  Leader, Followers, World

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• I see worries in the fact that we have the power to manipulate genes in ways that would be improbable or impossible through conventional evolution. We shouldn't be complacent in thinking that we can predict the results.

  Colin Blakemore

  Thinking, Gmos, Worry

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• It saves trouble to be conventional, for you're not always explaining things.

  Myrtle Reed

  Trouble, Explaining, Explaining Things

  Myrtle Reed (1916). “Old Rose and Silver”, p.19, Library of Alexandria

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