Conventional Quotes - Page 6

• I despair of persuading people to drop the familiar and comforting tactic of dichotomy. Perhaps, instead, we might expand the framework of debates by seeking other dichotomies more appropriate than, or simply different from, the conventional divisions. All dichotomies are simplifications, but the rendition of a conflict along differing axes of several orthogonal dichotomies might provide an amplitude of proper intellectual space without forcing us to forgo our most comforting tool of thought.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Axes, Space, People

  "Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time". Book by Stephen Jay Gould, p. 8, 1987.

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• History is filled with examples of men and women who rendered highly effective performance without the conventional badges of accomplishment in terms of certificates, diplomas, or degrees. Diplomas and tests are useful servants, but Congress has mandated the commonsense proposition that they are not to become masters of reality.

  Warren E. Burger

  Reality, Men, Degrees

  Griggs v. Duke Power Co., 401 U.S. 424, (432), 1971.

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• One of the things particularly admirable in the public utterances of President Lincoln is a certain tone of familiar dignity, which, while it is perhaps the most difficult attainment of mere style, is also no doubtful indication of personal character. There must be something essentially noble in an elective ruler who can descend to the level of confidential ease without forfeiting respect, something very manly in one who can break through the etiquette of his conventional rank and trust himself to the reason and intelligence of those who have elected him.

  James Russell Lowell

  Character, Break Through, Style

  James Russell Lowell (2015). “Abraham Lincoln”, p.22, Sheba Blake Publishing

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• It is so hard for an evolutionary biologist to write about extinction caused by human stupidity. Let me then float an unconventional plea, the inverse of the usual argument. The extinction of Partula is unfair to Partula. That is the conventional argument, and I do not challenge its primacy. But we need a humanistic ecology as well, both for the practical reason that people will always touch people more than snails do or can, and for the moral reason that humans are legitimately the measure of all ethical questions for these are our issues, not nature's.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Writing, Issues, Ethical Questions

  "Eight Little Piggies: Reflections in Natural History". Book by Stephen Jay Gould. "Unenchanted Evening", p. 39, 1993.

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• I think this fear of insanity is comparable to the fear people once had of falling off the edge of the world. Or the fear of heretics...What's happening is that each year our old flat earth of conventional reason becomes less and less adequate to handle the experiences we have and this is creating wide-spread feelings of topsy-turviness. As a result we're getting more and more people in irrational areas of thought...occultism, mysticism, drug changes and the like...because they feel an inadequacy in classical reason to handle what they know are real experiences.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Real, Fall, Thinking

  "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, 1974.

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• In the conventional wisdom of conservatives, the modern search for security is regularly billed as the greatest single threat to economic progress.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Progress, Modern, Economic

  John Kenneth Galbraith (1998). “The Affluent Society”, p.94, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• I know I'm not a conventional beauty. You can read a lot of painful things on the Internet, which criticise you aesthetically - but as far as I'm concerned, that's not what an actress is.

  Natalie Dormer

  Actresses, Internet, Painful

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• I don't like guys who are conventional. I'm an achiever; he has to be an achiever. I admire drive, I admire ambition. I like a guy who keeps my on my toes.

  Priyanka Chopra

  Ambition, Guy, Toes

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• Of course there are regrets. I shall regret always that I found my own authentic voice in politics. I was too conservative, too conventional. Too safe, too often. Too defensive. Too reactive. Later, too often on the back foot.

  John Major

  Regret, Voice, Feet

  John Major (2013). “John Major: The Autobiography”, p.9, HarperCollins UK

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• I'm not a money manager, but I can tell you what the conventional wisdom is. The younger you are, the more risk you can take on.

  Maria Bartiromo

  Risk, Conventional Wisdom, Managers

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• I was 22 and stopped writing plays, and I didn't start again until I was 25. I was writing badly. In college, I attempted to write these more conventional plays, but the theater I loved was downtown experimental theater. I didn't feel like I could do that either. It didn't occur to me to do my own thing.

  Annie Baker

  Writing, College, Play

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• Being able to provoke a different point of view to the standard current ideological or political perspective as played out in conventional newspaper or radio reportage is what a public intellectual does. But it's not merely about being oppositional, because that's too negative.

  Susie Orbach

  Views, Perspective, Political

  "Britain's intellectuals: leading thinkers have their say". www.theguardian.com. May 7, 2011.

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• I do think that the standard media is controlled by the conventional wisdom about global warming. We've come to believe - from reading a lot of articles and talking to a lot of scientists - that there's another side to be heard.

  Steven Levitt

  Wisdom, Believe, Reading

  "Personal Quotes/ Biography". www.imdb.com.

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• Clinton is a big personality who has led a big life, and for some of the media conventional wisdom to boil it down to a view that 'all people are really interested in' are a few moments of madness in the Oval Office gets him, the importance of the presidency, and the significance of his life, all wrong.

  Alastair Campbell

  Views, Media, People

  "The Bill Clinton I knew" by Alastair Campbell, www.theguardian.com. June 26, 2004.

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• We cleave to the past too much in Germany. All of our German art is too bogged down in the conventional... I think more highly of a free person who consciously puts convention aside.

  Paula Modersohn-Becker

  Art, Past, Thinking

  "Expressionism". Book by Norbert Wolf and Uta Grosenick, p. 74, 2004.

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• Allow the brush to 'wander' above the realm of conventional judgement and practice.

  Joshua L. Goldberg

  Practice, Judgement, Painting

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• Conventional wisdom tells us we'll only be happier after a divorce if the marriage itself was a war zone.

  Ariel Gore

  War, Divorce, Conventional Wisdom

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• The harsh reality is that America moves on four wheels, powered by conventional internal-combustion engines. At this point, while the elite media (excluding Newsweek) trumpet the benefits of hybrids and Ford and Toyota plan to lead the nation into a low-powered, high-mileage hybrid Utopia, the multitudes remain loyal to the gas-guzzling family bus in the driveway.

  Brock Yates

  Moving, Reality, Media

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• Unlike conventional jocks, who tend to sell aluminum siding and give canned speeches to parochial-school athletic banquets in the off-season, race drivers never shuck their image when they leave the stadium. They are supposed to be zany, nomadic soldiers of fortune who are involved in wild endeavors during every waking moment.

  Brock Yates

  School, Race, Giving

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• I am not concerned with truth, nor with conventional notions of what is beautiful.

  Mark Strand

  Beautiful, Notion, Concerned

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• It's funny, because in deference to conventional wisdom, I spent my struggling writer years trying to suppress my naturally baroque literary voice and write clean, spare prose. I finally gave up and embraced my baroque tendencies when I wrote the Kushiel series.

  Jacqueline Carey

  Wisdom, Struggle, Writing

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• I lead a very conventional life.

  Joan Didion

  Conventional Life

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• In every art we are always obliged to return to the accepted means of expression, the conventional language of the art. What is a black-and-white drawing but a convention to which the beholder has become so accustomed that with his mind's eye he sees a complete equivalent in the translation from nature?

  Eugene Delacroix

  Art, Mean, Eye

  "Journal of Delacroix". Book by Hubert Wellington, translated by Lucy Norton, p.334, 1980.

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• In the past Berlin was much more radical and extreme and now it's becoming much more of a conventional European city.

  Olafur Eliasson

  Past, Cities, Berlin

  "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• What the Depression teaches us is that when the economy is so depressed that even a zero interest rate isn't low enough, you have to put conventional notions of prudence and sound policy aside.

  Paul Krugman

  Zero, Sound, Enough

  "Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman on the Economy". Live chat, www.washingtonpost.com. December 15, 2008.

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