Conventional Thinking Quotes

#1. Nintendo's way is to challenge conventional thinking. Not just for the sake of doing things differently, but to do things better.

Reggie Fils-Aime

#2. The proposal that the human household originated in competition over food presents a challenge to conventional thinking because it holds economics as primary and sexual relations as secondary.

Richard W. Wrangham

#3. 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

#4. In her broadcasts, speeches, and newspaper columns, ER would challenge conventional thinking about women and work. "Isn't it a fact that women have always worked, often very hard?" ER asked an audience in 1936. "Did anyone make a fuss about it until they began to get paid for their work?"10

Stephen Drury Smith

#5. The problem in our society is the ego psychology and conventional wisdom about "look out for #1." That conventional wisdom thinks that "love your enemy" is to some a principle no one can ever live by.

Robert Thurman

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

John Kenneth Galbraith

#7. 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

#8. Difficult times disrupt your conventional ways of thinking and push you to forge better habits of thought, performance and being.

Robin S. Sharma

#9. The people who do make big discoveries are the ones who somehow manage to free themselves from conventional ways of thinking and to see the subject from a new perspective.

Anthony James Leggett

#10. I think that the solution of the question of numerical superiority of Russian conventional forces has to be solved.

Helmut Schmidt

#11. Newspaper accounts must not only be studied, but, occasionally refuted.

Harold Holzer

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. I would finally renounce my delusional hypotheses and revert to thinking of myself as a human of more conventional circumstances and return to mathematical research.

John Forbes Nash Jr.

#16. There's a conventional wisdom that says that strategic thinking is much more important than relationship building, which doesn't seem to be nearly as highly valued as it should be, based on what some of the leaders that I've spoken with have said to me.

Tom Rath

#17. It is, I think, a good deal owing to the preponderance of the commercial element in Society that conversation has sunk to its present dull level of conventional chatter.

Dorothy Nevill

#18. A trend was a trend only because people thought it so. And in thinking it so, they made it so.

Tom Clancy

#19. I like to think of myself as a free spirit. I've never married. I'm not conventional in that way. But I do like romance. I've been fortunate enough that I've had great love, and I've dated remarkable men in my life. I'm very thankful for all of that.

Patricia Clarkson

#20. I see worries in the fact that we have the power to manipulate genes in ways that would be improbable or impossible through conventional evolution. We shouldn't be complacent in thinking that we can predict the results.

Colin Blakemore

#21. The facts of science are real enough, and so are the techniques that scientists use, and so are the technologies based on them. But the belief system that governs conventional scientific thinking is an act of faith.

Rupert Sheldrake

#22. I think anybody who tries to follow the conventional Hollywood rule, will probably be better liked than the ones who try to think a little bit out of the box.

Bruno Zheng Wu

#23. Certainly my films are cinematically unusual, and quite contemplative in their pacing compared to conventional films, but I think overall they are quite engaging, accessible, and even funny.

Jenni Olson

#24. Contemporary art challenges us.. it broadens our horizons. It asks us to think beyond the limits of conventional wisdom.

Eli Broad

#25. We have created crime, just as the propertarians did. We force a man outside the sphere of our approval, and then condemn him for it. We've made laws, laws of conventional behavior, built walls all around ourselves, and we can't see them, because they're part of our thinking.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#26. States are like people. They do not question the awful status quo until some dramatic event overturns the conventional and lax way of thinking.

Victor Davis Hanson

#27. I feel that whatever virtues the novel may have are very much connected with the limitations you mention. I am not writing a conventional novel, and I think that the quality of the novel I write will derive precisely from the peculiarity or aloneness, if you will, of the experience I write from.

Flannery O'Connor

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

Sinclair Lewis

#29. 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

#30. Forward-thinking teachers and school administrators across the country are creating a whole range of alternatives to cookie-cutter teaching and evaluation methods, such as the use of student portfolios and exhibitions in addition to conventional exams to assess students' progress.

Hillary Rodham Clinton

#31. Conventional wisdom won't provide continual growth.

Jason Jennings

#32. 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

#33. 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

#34. I've never really lived a conventional life, so I think it's quite foolish for me or anyone else to start thinking that I am going to start making conventional choices.

Madonna Ciccone

#35. 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

#36. Because I was moved by the sorry spectacle of a conventional young man thinking that he had become radically unconventional.

Vera Caspary

#37. 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

#38. All of my films have been very hard to understand at the script stage because they're very different. At the time I did them they were not conventional. The executives could only think in terms of what they'd already seen. It's hard for them to think in terms of what has never been done before.

George Lucas