Conventional Quotes - Page 2

• Conventional dogmas, even if endowed with the authority of an Aristotle - ancient or modern - must be tested vigorously. If they are found wanting, we need not bother with them. But if they are found to be substantially correct, we may not overlook them.

  Norman Lamm

  Needs, May, Dogma

  Norman Lamm (2006). “Faith and Doubt: Studies in Traditional Jewish Thought”, p.122, KTAV Publishing House, Inc.

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• When machines fail, when technology fails, when the conventional religion fails, people have got to have something. Even a zombin lurching through the night can seem pretty cheerful compared to the existential comedy/horror of the ozone layer dissolving under the combined assult of a million flurocarbon spray cans of deoderant." - The Mist

  Stephen King

  Technology, Night, Ozone

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• Then idiots talk....of Energy. If there is a word in the dictionary under any letter from A to Z that I abominate, it is energy. It is such a conventional superstition, such parrot gabble! What the deuce!....But show me a good opportunity, show me something really worth being energetic about, and I'll show you energy.

  Charles Dickens

  Opportunity, Energy, Deuces

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• A woman cannot live in the light of intellect. Society forbids it. Those conventional frivolities, which are called her 'duties', forbid it. Her 'domestic duties', high-sounding words, which, for the most part, are but bad habits (which she has not the courage to enfranchise herself from, the strength to break through), forbid it.

  Florence Nightingale

  Light, Break Through, Habit

  Florence Nightingale (1991). “Cassandra: And Other Selections from Suggestions for Thought”, Pickering & Chatto Publishers

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• Who can begin conventional amiability the first thing in the morning?

  Elizabeth von Arnim

  Morning, Firsts

  Elizabeth Von Arnim (2006). “Elizabeth and Her German Garden”, p.42, Filiquarian Publishing, LLC.

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• Stories set in the Culture in which Things Went Wrong tended to start with humans losing or forgetting or deliberately leaving behind their terminal. It was a conventional opening, the equivalent of straying off the path in the wild woods in one age, or a car breaking down at night on a lonely road in another.

  Iain Banks

  Lonely, Night, Car

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• By morning she was dead. She had not died of starvation or committed suicide by any conventional means. She had simply willed herself to die, and being a strong-willed woman, she had succeeded. She had missed dying on her birthday by two days.

  John Berendt

  Suicide, Strong, Morning

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• I see the beauty of Mike's attempt to devise an ideal ethic and applaud his recognition that such must start by junking the present sexual code and starting fresh. Most philosophers haven't the courage for this; they swallow the basics of the present code--monogamy, family pattern, continence, body taboos, conventional restrictions on intercourse, and so forth--then fiddle with details...even such piffle as discussing whether the female breast is an obscene sight! (p.365)

  Robert A. Heinlein

  Sight, Female, Details

  Robert A. Heinlein (1987). “Stranger in a Strange Land”, p.342, Penguin

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• When our thoughts revolve we are so often deceived into supposing that their violent movement is an indication of their vigorous originality, the upheaval of prejudice and fixed ideas, when all the time it is more likely that the machine which contains them is only an elaborate cement-mixer, and when the thinking is finished, those whirling thoughts are smoothed into the unchanged conventional mould and seeing them set solid enough to dance, to build, to travel upon, we would never dream of their first deceit, of the hope once roused by their apparently violent reorganisation.

  Janet Frame

  Dream, Thinking, Ideas

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• This is what we have all come to Cannes for: for something different, experimental, a tilting at windmills, a great big pole-vault over the barrier of normality by someone who feels that the possibilities of cinema have not been exhausted by conventional realist drama.

  Peter Bradshaw

  Drama, Different, Cinema

  "Cannes 2012: Holy Motors - review" by Peter Bradshaw, www.theguardian.com. May 23, 2012.

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• The wizards represent all that the true 'muggle' most fears: They are plainly outcasts and comfortable with being so. Nothing is more unnerving to the truly conventional than the unashamed misfit!

  J. K. Rowling

  Muggles, Wizards, Misfits

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• It is our task, both in science and in society at large, to prove the conventional wisdom wrong and to make our unpredictable dreams come true

  Freeman Dyson

  Dream, Tasks, Unpredictable

  Freeman Dyson (2013). “FROM EROS TO GAIA”, p.94, Pantheon

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• I’m not so sure that the conventional wisdom makes any sense. Yes, it might be technically easy to track people and all that. But in the long-term I’m optimistic that we’ll see the pendulum swing back in the other direction towards more privacy.

  Rod Humble

  Optimistic, Swings, Long

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• Conventional measures of mental ability, such as intelligence tests and scholarship, show some of the very highest records belong to INFP and INFJ types, who relegate thinking to last place or next to last. The preference for thinking appears to have far less intellectual effect than the preference for intuition, even in some technical fields, such as scientific research, where its influence was expected to be most important.

  Isabel Briggs Myers

  Thinking, Intellectual, Intuition

  "Gifts Differing: Understanding Personality Type".

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• If I have done anything, it is to make ugly appealing. In fact, most of my work is concerned with destroying—or at least deconstructing—conventional ideas of beauty, of the generic appeal of the beautiful, glamorous, bourgeois woman. Fashion fosters clichés of beauty, but I want to tear them apart.

  Miuccia Prada

  Beautiful, Fashion, Ideas

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• We're stuck. We're stuck between the East and the West. Between the past and the future. On the one hand there are the secular modernists, so proud of the regime they constructed, you cannot breathe a critical word. They've got the army and half of the state on their side. On the other hand there are the conventional traditionalist, so infatuated with the Ottoman past, you cannot breathe a critical word. They've got the general public and the remaining half of the state on their side.

  Elif Safak

  Army, Past, Hands

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• Progress is not a straight line; the future is not a mere projection of trends in the present. Rather, it is revolutionary. It overturns the conventional wisdom of the present, which often conceals or ignores the clues to the future.

  Dr. An Wang

  Progress, Lines, Trends

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• I have two ideas for novels at the moment, neither of them all that conventional, but I'm not ready to choose between them yet, let alone settle down to the process of writing.

  Jonathan Coe

  Writing, Ideas, Two

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

  Steven Levitt

  Experts, Theory, Conventional Wisdom

  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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• But in a lot of ways my poems are very conventional, and it's no big deal for me to write a poem in either free verse or strict form; modern poets can, and do, do both.

  Andrew Motion

  Writing, Way, Modern

  "Ode to a right royal charmer". Interview With Euan Ferguson, www.theguardian.com. July 23, 2000.

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• Similarly, it is argued that the culture of Islam is incompatible with democracy. Basically, this conventional perspective of the Middle East thus contends that democracy in that region is neither possible nor even desirable

  Recep Tayyip Erdogan

  Perspective, Islam, Democracy

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• Main thing is to publish. Blog, tweet, write, photograph, tweet, video, code, play around with data - or a combination of all of the above. a) it will keep your journalistic ‘muscle’ in practice. b) if you’re any good, you’ll get noticed. And bear in mind you can do these things at other places than conventional news organisations. Many businesses, NGOs, arts organisations, public bodies, universities, etc are now publishers of extremely high quality stuff. Good places to practise your craft before moving on.

  Alan Rusbridger

  Art, Moving, Writing

  "I am Alan Rusbridger, editor in chief of the Guardian - the news org that broke the story of NSA surveillance of US citizens - AMAA", rebrn.com. July 31, 2013.

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• Children of course are monstrously conventional, repelled at once by whatever is off-center, out of whack, unmanageable. And being an only child I had been coddled a good deal (also scolded). I was awkward, precocious, timid, full of my private rituals and aversions.

  Alice Munro

  Children, Awkward, Only Child

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• In the perception of the incongruous stimuli, the recognition process is temporarily thwarted and exhibits characteristics which are generally not observable in the recognition of more conventional stimuli.

  Jerome Bruner

  Perception, Recognition, Characteristics

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• Whether the patient has a cardiac condition, hypertension, autoimmune disease, fibroids, or asthma, he or she must be informed that fasting and natural, plant-based diets are a viable alternative to conventional therapy, and an effective one.

  Joel Fuhrman

  Fasting, Alternatives, Disease

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