Conventional Quotes

• Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.

  Mark Twain

  Inspirational, Motivational, Change

  Mark Twain (2016). “The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain”, p.97, Chartwell

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• If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking.

  George S. Patton

  Motivational, Business, Military

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• The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Life, Motivational, Jobs

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• All progress depends on the unreasonable man.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Change, Success, Creativity

  Man and Superman "Maxims for Revolutionists" (1903) See Hawthorne 18

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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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• It's easy to live the expected and conventional. It's when you live the unexpected that you start having fun with your life.

  Richard Bach

  Fun, Creativity, Ideas

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• Man is potentially a son, and woman is potentially a mother; woman depends on the dependence of man. The spinster, if pathetic at all, is pathetic because she has no one to look after, not because there is no one to look after her. Bear in mind that the conventional spinster keeps a canaary as a substitute for a husband.

  Stella Benson

  Mother, Husband, Son

  Stella Benson (1916). “I Pose”

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• Swim upstream. Go the other way. 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. But be prepared for a lot of folks to wave you down and tell you you're headed the wrong way. I guess in all my years, what I heard more often than anything was: a town of less than 50,000 population cannot support a discount store for very long.

  Sam Walton

  Years, Opposites, Long

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• There is nothing more vulgar than a petty bourgeois life with its halfpence, its victuals, its futile talk, and its useless conventional virtue.

  Anton Chekhov

  Vapid, Mediocrity, Useless

  "Letters of Anton Chekhov to His Family and Friends: With Biographical Sketch". Book by Anton Chekhov, 1920.

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• The habit of pleasing by flattery makes a language soft; the fear of offending by truth makes it circuitous and conventional.

  Walter Savage Landor

  Offending, Flattery, Language

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• Great spirits have always encountered opposition from mediocre minds. The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices and chooses instead to express his opinions courageously and honestly.

  Albert Einstein

  Inspirational, Life, Being Yourself

  Albert Einstein (2010). “The Ultimate Quotable Einstein”, p.149, Princeton University Press

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• It takes a lot of guts to stop measuring things that are measurable, and even more guts to create things that don't measure well by conventional means.

  Seth

  Mean, Wells, Guts

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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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• 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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• 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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• In the end, a theory is accepted not because it is confirmed by conventional empirical tests, but because researchers persuade one another that the theory is correct and relevant.

  Fischer Black

  Tests, Accepted, Ends

  Fischer Black (2009). “Business Cycles and Equilibrium”, p.179, John Wiley & Sons

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• Each of us should choose which course of action we must take; education, conventional political action, or even peaceful civil disobedience to bring about necessary changes, but let it not be said that we did nothing.

  Ron Paul

  Political, Peaceful, Necessary Change

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• Conventional wisdom holds that setting a timetable for getting American troops out of Iraq would be a mistake.

  Nick Clooney

  Mistake, Iraq, Troops

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• One of the reasons, surely, why women have been credited with less perfect veracity than men is that the burden of conventional falsehood falls chiefly on them.

  Katharine Fullerton Gerould

  Fall, Men, Perfect

  Katharine Fullerton Gerould (1920). “Modes and Morals”

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• Picasso had nicknamed Georges Braque "Wilbur," thereby becoming "Orville" in their Wright Brothers-like ambition to get painting off the ground of conventional representation.

  Peter Schjeldahl

  Brother, Ambition, Becoming

  "In With the New" by Peter Schjeldahl, www.newyorker.com. October 27, 2014.

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• Conventional manners are a kind of literacy test for the alien who comes among us.

  Katharine Fullerton Gerould

  Tests, Aliens, Kind

  Katharine Fullerton Gerould (1920). “Modes and Morals”

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• I came to realize that far more important to me than any plot or conventional sense was the sheer directionality I felt while reading prose, the texture of time as it passed, life's white machine.

  Ben Lerner

  Reading, White, Important

  Ben Lerner (2012). “Leaving the Atocha Station”, p.11, Granta Books

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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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• One of the things I learned, the easiest of lessons, was that the better you do your job, often going against conventional mores, the less popular you are likely to be.

  David Halberstam

  Jobs, Lessons

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