Against Conventional Quotes

#1. To build a great company, which is a CEO's job, sometimes you have to stand up against conventional wisdom.

Carly Fiorina

#2. If you are the kind of person who listens to conservative advice, you may do okay in life, but you probably won't ever be a fantastic leader. You have to take risks, and you also have to go against conventional wisdom, because conventional wisdom doesn't make for startling advances in society.

Ruth Simmons

#3. 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

#4. 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 my not always make sense, so that's why I need to trust and obey the One who inspired them.

George Foreman

#5. The spiritual ambiguity growing up made me really latch onto a faith - Protestantism - that was somewhat conventional. Everyone else was rebelling against traditions and institutions, whereas I was rebelling against the upheaval and uncertainty in my family.

Sufjan Stevens

#6. Whenever I write about mental health and integrative therapies, I am accused of being prejudiced against pharmaceuticals. So let me be clear - integrative medicine is the judicious application of both conventional and evidence-based natural therapies.

Andrew Weil

#7. The energies of Lagos life- creative, malevolent, ambiguous- converge at the bus stops

Teju Cole

#8. Contrary to conventional military and game theory, the most effective offense is sometimes a direct attack against your political opponent's greatest strength - not his weaknesses - to place him immediately on the defensive.

Mark McKinnon

#9. If God were small enough for you to control, he would be too small to help you in time of need.

Anonymous

#10. He (Saddam Hussein) has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbours.

Colin Powell

#11. Part of the heart of anarchy is, dare to go against the grain of the conventional ways of thinking about our realities. Anarchists have always gone against the grain, and that's been a place of hope.

Bell Hooks

#12. Never so sweet a repast as the Reaper's when you tread upon the threshold of a Quiznos.

Oscar Wilde

#13. When everybody loves me, I will never be lonely.

Adam Duritz

#14. Because investors are not usually penalized for adhering to conventional practices, doing so is the less professionally risky strategy, even though it virtually guarantees against superior performance.

Seth Klarman

#15. The use of the blockade against Germany to starve large numbers of people to death broke through the moral barrier against the mass killing of civilians. It was the precedent for the 'conventional' bombing of civilians in the Second World War and then for the use of the atomic bomb.

Jonathan Glover

#16. Cliches, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence.

Hannah Arendt

#17. I hate that just because I live here I'm supposed to live politics. And there's nothing you can do. If you don't live politics, politics will leave you.

Marlon James

#18. The country girls were considered a menace to the social order. Their beauty shone out too boldly against a conventional background.

Willa Cather

#19. If you do not want an average life, you must be on guard against, and quietly suspicious of, conclusions made by conventional thinking.

Andy Andrews

#20. I used to enjoy using dots where they would be least expected, not at the end of a sentence but in the middle, creating the effect ... of a skipped beat. It seemed to me the mind reacted - first! ... in dots, dashes, and exclamation points, then rationalized, drew up a brief, with periods.

Tom Wolfe

#21. Something else I learnt...is respect for reality as against all the many alternatives to it--conventional assumptions, fashionable ways of looking at things, ideologies, social or personal aspirations, fears, intentions, wishful thinking, religious claims, and the rest...

Bryan Magee

#22. A willingness to go against the conventional wisdom was one of the side effects of looking at the world in a particular light.

Kem Nunn

#23. Poland is one of the few countries that can afford to conduct a conventional monetary policy and that means we have to act against the buildup of imbalances in the economy.

Marek Belka

#24. One must always try to see the truth of a situation - it makes things universal.

V.S. Naipaul

#25. The April's in her eyes: it is love's Spring,
And these the showers to bring it on..

William Shakespeare

#26. I was being measured against the expectation that any feminist had to be unattractive in a conventional sense - and then described in contrast to that stereotype. The subtext was: If you could get a man, why would you need equal pay?

Gloria Steinem

#27. Israel will not tolerate a situation in which Iran has effective control of non-conventional weapons that can be used directly against the state of Israel.

Ehud Olmert

#28. A written constitution is needed to protect values AGAINST prevailing wisdom.

Antonin Scalia

#29. His dark eyes took me in, and I wondered what they would look like if he fell in love.

F Scott Fitzgerald

#30. I have found the Iron to be my greatest friend. It never freaks out on me, never runs. Friends may come and go. But two hundred pounds is always two hundred pounds

Henry Rollins

#31. You're only two years older than me, darling. Where have you been all my life?

Christopher Plummer