Conventional Wisdom Quotes - Page 3

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

  Kevin Costner

  Scary, What If, Ifs

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

  Kevin Costner

  Artist, Trouble, Conventional

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• When you find errors in conventional wisdom-when everyone says A and A is not true-you gain competitive advantage. Only a few times do you have to find errors in conventional wisdom to make a living.

  Larry Ellison

  Errors, Gains, Advantage

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• Millions of mutual-fund investors sleep well at night, serene in the belief that superior outcomes result from pooling funds with like-minded investors and engaging high-quality investment managers to provide professional insight. The conventional wisdom ends up hopelessly unwise, as evidence shows an overwhelming rate of failure by mutual funds to deliver on promises.

  David F. Swensen

  Sleep, Night, Promise

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• We have been doing things that are contrary; the things that people tell us won't work from the beginning. In fact, the only way to get ahead is to find errors in conventional wisdom.

  Larry Ellison

  Inspirational, Errors, People

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• It always bothered me when people came off stage and were told how great they were. They weren't, really, in my opinion. It was then I started thinking that, contrary to conventional wisdom, film was the artful medium for the actor, not the stage.

  Jack Nicholson

  Thinking, People, Actors

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• Sometimes God gives instructions that go against conventional wisdom, such as treating people kindly when they're hateful. Who really wants to do that? Instructions like that may not always make sense, so that's why I need to trust and obey the One who inspired them.

  George Foreman

  People, Giving, Needs

  George Foreman, Ken Abraham (2007). “God In My Corner: A Spiritual Memoir”, p.99, Thomas Nelson

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• I don't think that split government is a good idea. Conventional wisdom in Washington for years has been that divided government is good because of a check and a balance. What I believe happens all too often, regardless of which party is there's gridlock. And I think the better argument is give one party a chance, give them a chance with a House and a Senate and a president. Give them a few years to see what they can do. And if you don't like it, put another party in.

  Scott Walker

  Believe, Party, Thinking

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• One of the toughest battles in intelligence is combating conventional wisdom.

  Robert M. Gates

  Battle, Conventional

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• Contrarian thinking at its best simply asks, Is this really true? It speaks up when the politically correct answer or the conventional wisdom doesn't match reality - when things simply don't work the way everyone says they should.

  Larry Osborne

  Reality, Thinking, Answers

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