Conventional Quotes - Page 4

• The elderly have weathered enough squalls to know that this one, too, shall pass. They own the courage to be original; they've learned to hold their own values above the conventional wisdom.

  Sarah Ferguson

  Elderly, Age, Enough

  Sarah Ferguson (2010). “What I Know Now: Simple Lessons Learned the Hard Way”, p.67, Simon and Schuster

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• A conventional playwright tries to tell you more about the characters than they know about themselves.

  Timothy West

  Character, Trying, Playwright

  "The Birthday Party is 50", www.theguardian.com. May 15, 2008.

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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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• Yes, I laugh at all mankind, and the imposition that they dare to practice when they talk of hearts. I laugh at human passions and human cares, vice and virtue, religion and impiety; they are all the result of petty localities, and artificial situation. One physical want, one severe and abrupt lesson from the colorless and shriveled lip of necessity, is worth all the logic of the empty wretches who have presumed to prate it, from Zeno down to Burgersdicius. It silences in a second all the feeble sophistry of conventional life, and ascetical passion.

  Charles Robert Maturin

  Passion, Heart, Practice

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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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• Question everything, even if it represents generations of conventional wisdom.

  Robert Ringer

  Creativity, Ideas, Innovation

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• The Irish Free State was one of dozens of new European democracies to emerge from the cauldron of the 1914-1918 war. It was one of the very few that was still democratic in 1939. This book shows how the steely determination of one man, Kevin O'Higgins, made this possible. O'Higgins faced down mutinies in both the Gardai and the Army. He dissolved the Dáil Courts which were a parallel system that might easily have undermined the conventional courts. With WT Cosgrave, he put through a constitution which reconciled the local opponents of independence with the new State.

  John Bruton

  Determination, War, Book

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• A wise and clear-eyed book, Future Hype challenges the conventional wisdom about technological change and provides a fresh perspective on our so-called computer age.

  Nicholas G. Carr

  Wise, Book, Technological Change

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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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• 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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• James Russell offers a timely and compelling blueprint for a realistic transformation of America's energy consumption by refusing to fall victim to conventional thinking. Accessible?pragmatic even?Russell's proposals speak to goals on the immediate horizon and underscore the role that intelligent design can play now in America. On a longer horizon, his analysis points to a range of issues about land use, transportation, and coordination of public and private investments to which the design professions have an enormous contribution to make. Here design and policy find common ground.

  Barry Bergdoll

  Fall, Thinking, Intelligent

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• I try to encourage people to think for themselves, to question standard assumptions... Don't take assumptions for granted. Begin by taking a skeptical attitude toward anything that is conventional wisdom. Make it justify itself. It usually can't. Be willing to ask questions about what is taken for granted. Try to think things through for yourself.

  Noam Chomsky

  Wisdom, Attitude, Taken

  Institute Professor Department of Linguistics and Philosophy Noam Chomsky, Noam Chomsky, John Junkerman, Takei Masakazu (2015). “Power and Terror: Conflict, Hegemony, and the Rule of Force”, p.5, Routledge

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• I’ve never agreed with the conventional wisdom that ‘actors are great liars.’ If more people understood the acting process, the goals of good actors, the conventional wisdom would be ‘actors are terrible liars,’ because only bad actors lie on the job. The good ones hate fakery and avoid manufactured emotion at all costs. Any script is enough of a lie anyway. (What experience does any actor have with flying a spacecraft? Killing someone?) What’s called for, what actors are hired for, is to bring reality to the arbitrary.

  Rob Lowe

  Jobs, Liars, Lying

  Rob Lowe (2011). “Stories I Only Tell My Friends: An Autobiography”, p.107, Macmillan

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• Ignore the conventional wisdom. If everybody else is doing it one way, there’s a good chance you can find your niche by going in exactly the opposite direction.

  Sam Walton

  Opposites, Way, Chance

  Sam Walton (2012). “Sam Walton: Made In America”, p.317, Bantam

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• Swim upstream. Go the other way. Ignore the conventional wisdom.

  Sam Walton

  Swim, Way, Conventional Wisdom

  Sam Walton (2012). “Sam Walton: Made In America”, p.317, Bantam

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• 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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• 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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