Conventional Quotes - Page 8

• Conventional analysis suffers from a profound failure of imagination. It imagines passing clouds to be permanent and is blind to powerful, long-term shifts taking place in full view of the world.

  George Friedman

  Powerful, Clouds, Views

  George Friedman (2009). “The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century”, p.3, Anchor

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• Anyone who was a rebel at one time in life cannot return to being conventional.

  Elsa Peretti

  Rebel, Return, One Time

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• Ah! In fact there are two moralities ... The petty one, the conventional one, the one devised by men, that keeps changing and bellows so loudly, making a commotion down here among us, in a perfectly pedestrian way ... But the other one, the eternal one, is all around and above us, like a landscape that surrounds us and the blue sky that gives us light.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Men, Sky, Two

  Gustave Flaubert (2010). “Madame Bovary: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)”, p.133, Penguin

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• Ordinary life bypassed me, but I also bypassed it. It couldn't have been any other way.Conventional life and conventional people are not for me.

  Edna O'Brien

  People, Ordinary, Way

  Novelists, Poets and Playwrights (2002).

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• Some `advanced thinkers' are of the opinion that anyone who differs from the conventional opinion must be in the right. This is a delusion; if it were not, truth would be easier to come by than it is.

  Bertrand Russell

  Would Be, Opinion, Easier

  Bertrand Russell (2009). “Bertrand Russell's Best”, p.62, Routledge

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• Even if conventional medicine tells you that your condition is incurable or that your only option is to live a life dependent on drugs with troublesome side effects, there is hope for improving or reversing your condition.

  Leon Chaitow

  Medicine, Drug, Sides

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• My father was in real estate, banking, and land management. As family life, it was very conventional, happy, and comfortable. We weren't wealthy, but we were well-off.

  Julia Child

  Father, Real, Land

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• It takes heart to be a guerrilla warrior because you’re on your own. In conventional warfare you have tanks and a whole lot of other people with you to back you up - planes over your head and all that kind of stuff. But a guerrilla is on his own. All you have is a rifle, some sneakers and a bowl of rice, and that’s all you need - and a lot of heart.

  Malcolm X

  Heart, Warrior, Sneakers

  "The Ballot or The Bullet (Cleveland Version)". Malcolm X's speech at Cory Methodist Church in Cleveland, Ohio (April 3, 1964) as quoted in "Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements" edited by George Breitman (pp. 23-44), 1965.

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• The EPA's greenhouse gas regulations, along with a host of other onerous regulations, are unnecessarily driving out conventional fuels as part of America's energy mix. The consequences are higher energy prices for families and a contraction of our nation's economic growth.

  Gina McCarthy

  America, Growth, Regulation

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• It may sound terrible, but I often say that the military saved me from a conventional life in the United States and I've never really thanked them for it, because I haven't exactly been pro-military in my work.

  Robert Jay Lifton

  Military, Sound, United States

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• It has long been a tradition among novel writers that a book must end by everybody getting just what they wanted, or if the conventional happy ending was impossible, then it must be a tragedy in which one or both should die. In real life very few of us get what we want, our tragedies don't kill us, but we go on living them year after year, carrying them with us like a scar on an old wound.

  Willa Cather

  Real, Book, Writing

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• You can teach almost anyone determined to learn them the basics required to write sentences and paragraphs that say what you want them to say clearly and concisely. It's far more difficult to get people to think like a writer, to give up conventional habits of mind and emotion. You must be able to step inside your character's skin, and at the same time to remain outside the dicey circumstances you have maneuvered her into.

  Anne Bernays

  Giving Up, Character, Writing

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• Some people are aware of another sort of thinking which... leads to those simple ideas that are obvious only after they have been thought of... the term 'lateral thinking' has been coined to describe this orther sort of thinking; 'vertical thinking' is used to denote the conventional logical process.

  Edward de Bono

  Simple, Thinking, Ideas

  The Use of Lateral Thinking foreword (1967)

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• All the joys - animal and human - of a free life are mine. I have escaped everything that is artificial, conventional, customary.

  Paul Gauguin

  Freedom, Animal, Joy

  Paul Gauguin (2012). “Noa Noa: The Tahitian Journal”, p.17, Courier Corporation

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• If form is mechanically applied, it may indeed result in work that is conventional, if not pedantic or stupid. But form used well can become the very vehicle of freedom, of discovering the creative surprises that liberate mind-at-play.

  Stephen Nachmanovitch

  Stupid, Play, Creative

  Stephen Nachmanovitch (1991). “Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art”, p.84, Penguin

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• What sometimes enrages me and always disappoints and grieves me is the preference of great schools of learning for the derivative as opposed to the original, for the conventional and thin which can be duplicated in many copies rather than the new and powerful, and for arid correctness and limitation of scope and method rather than for universal newness and beauty, wherever it may be seen.

  Norbert Wiener

  Powerful, School, Grieving

  Norbert Wiener (1954). “The human use of human beings: cybernetics and society”

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• The world is always changed by people who don't listen to conventional wisdom. I think we often set our goals too small and try to accomplish them too quickly.

  Rick Warren

  Thinking, Goal, People

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• Art pierces opaque subjectivity, the not seeing of conventional life, and discloses reality.

  Langdon Brown Gilkey

  Art, Reality, Opaque

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• It is time for the scientific community to stop giving alternative medicine a free ride There cannot be two kinds of medicine — conventional and alternative. There is only medicine that has been adequately tested and medicine that has not, medicine that works and medicine that may or may not work. Once a treatment has been tested rigorously, it no longer matters whether it was considered alternative at the outset. If it is found to be reasonably safe and effective, it will be accepted.

  Marcia Angell

  Two, Medicine, Giving

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• While [Plato] affirmed with emphasis that the place of the individual in society should not be determined by birth or wealth or any conventional status, but by his own nature as discovered in the process of education, he had no perception of the uniqueness of individuals. For him they fall by nature into classes, and into a very small number of classes at that.

  John Dewey

  Plato, Fall, Small Numbers

  John Dewey (2015). “Democracy and Education: Top American Authors”, p.68, 谷月社

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• Think how much better it is to criticize conventional customs if you yourself live up to them, scrupulously.

  Sinclair Lewis

  Thinking, Criticize, Customs

  "Main Street". Book by Sinclair Lewis, 1920.

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• The author brings to the table a healthy skepticism of the conventional wisdom, an admirable ability to separate fact from fancy, and an undisguised repugnance for the mumbo-jumbo that's the curse of so much commentary on anything to do with economics or investment. A World of Wealth is not only a lively read, but an exceptionally enlightening and rewarding one to boot.

  Alan Abelson

  Healthy, Boots, World

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• Our country has suffered from an on-again, off-again energy policy that has failed to get us to energy independence. As President Obama has said, we need a comprehensive energy plan for the country that includes conventional resources like oil and gas, but that also takes advantage of wind, solar, biomass, geothermal, and other renewable resources.

  Ken Salazar

  Country, Wind, Oil

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• I'm not a conventional guy. I've never been a conventional guy.

  Dontrelle Willis

  Guy

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• The word "collective" is not so often used because it has been basically used by socialists and communists and has a different history. The word "cooperative" means the workplace itself is organized cooperatively, rather than in the conventional capitalistic, hierarchical form.

  Richard D. Wolff

  Mean, Different, Workplace

  "The Progressive Interview". Interview with Ed Rampell, www.democracyatwork.info. April 10, 2014.

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