Top 100 Quotes About Conventional Wisdom
#1. The conventional wisdom is that people come to the United States, and immigration is so great, and they say, 'America, what a great country.' And a lot of that is true.
James Gray
#2. Strings of coincidence can strengthen us in the determination to follow our deepest intuitions even when they run counter to conventional wisdom and logic and cannot be subjected to rational explanation.
Robert Moss
#3. Challenge conventional wisdom. There is almost always a better way.
Ziad K. Abdelnour
#4. The Affluent Society not only changed the way the country viewed itself, but gave new phrases to the language: Conventional wisdom, the bland leading the bland, private opulence and public squalor.
Amartya Sen
#5. Doubt the conventional wisdom unless you can verify it with reason and experiment.
Steve Albini
#6. The conventional wisdom of fandom is that you must give your fans anything they want. But I've never felt that that's a healthy attitude - and that comes from being a Star Wars fan.
DJ Shadow
#7. I've always shied away from conventional wisdom, though I know the power of it.
Peter Jennings
#8. When you're used to being prepared to reject conventional wisdom, it leaves you open to learn more.
Mayim Bialik
#9. Community organizing is all about building grassroots support. It's about identifying the people around you with whom you can create a common, passionate cause. And it's about ignoring the conventional wisdom of company politics and instead playing the game by very different rules.
Tom Peters
#10. Conventional wisdom tells us to avoid taking unalterable action while at a low point in life. I have never been conventional.
Therese Fowler
#11. The most important aspect of my personality as far as determining my success goes; has been my questioning conventional wisdom, doubting experts and questioning authority. While that can be painful in your relationships with your parents and teachers, it's enormously useful in life.
Larry Ellison
#12. Contemporary art challenges us.. it broadens our horizons. It asks us to think beyond the limits of conventional wisdom.
Eli Broad
#13. Swim upstream. Go the other way. Ignore the conventional wisdom.
Sam Walton
#14. One of the toughest battles in intelligence is combating conventional wisdom.
Robert M. Gates
#15. 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
#16. Progress is not a straight line; the future is not a mere projection of trends in the present. Rather, it is revolutionary. It overturns the conventional wisdom of the present, which often conceals or ignores the clues to the future.
Dr. An Wang
#17. Anyone who strays too far from the majority view or the conventional wisdom is bound to be labeled "arrogant," "a maverick," "a Wildman," "weird," or even "crazy."
John Eliot
#18. By the time we reach adulthood we are so full of conventional wisdom, preconceived notions, and filters and limitations of various kinds that we don't even notice them.
Erland Bakke
#19. People always blame the girl; she should have said no. A monosyllable, but conventional wisdom has always been that boys can't manage it.
Anna Quindlen
#20. Contrary to conventional wisdom, dance is not a universal 'language' but many languages and dialects. There are close to 6000 verbal languages, and probably that many dance languages.
Judith Lynne Hanna
#21. If your writing collides with the conventional wisdom, there's going to be some kind of friction.
Pankaj Mishra
#22. There are lots of cycles to markets - boom and bust - and also in perceptions of people. The conventional wisdom of Steve Case as genius or fool was highly cyclical. The truth was always in the middle.
Steve Case
#23. Be realistic we're told. Listen to feedback. Play well with others. Compromise. Well, what if the "other" party is wrong? What if conventional wisdom is too conservative? It's this all-too-common impulse to complain, defer, and then give up that holds us back.
Ryan Holiday
#24. The most important lesson of New Labour is this: Every time we made progress we did it by challenging the conventional wisdom.
Ed Miliband
#25. Economists often like startling theorems, results which seem to run counter to conventional wisdom.
Joseph Stiglitz
#26. Innovation for holders of conventional wisdom is not novelty but annihilation.
Marshall McLuhan
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. To build a great company, which is a CEO's job, sometimes you have to stand up against conventional wisdom.
Carly Fiorina
#30. I don't believe any experiment until it is confirmed by theory. I find this is a witty inversion of "conventional" wisdom.
Arthur Eddington
#31. if you challenge the conventional wisdom, you will find ways to do things much better than they are currently done.
Michael Lewis
#32. Conventional wisdom on government's role in inequality often has it backwards. Tax reforms have resulted in a more progressive federal income tax; government transfer payments have become less progressive.
Paul Ryan
#33. Conventional Wisdom is certainly not wisdom, and only is conventional because foolishness is so common today.
Orrin Woodward
#34. Create a vision and never let the environment, other people's beliefs, or the limits of what has been done in the past shape your decisions. Ignore conventional wisdom.
Lionel Robbins, Baron Robbins
#35. Mainstream media tend to just mouth the conventional wisdom, to see everything through the filter of right and left.
Arianna Huffington
#36. 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
#37. Question everything, even if it represents generations of conventional wisdom.
Robert Ringer
#38. If you challenge conventional wisdom, you will find ways to do things much better than they are currently done.
Bill James
Michael Lewis
#39. Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, there is no reason either in football or in poetry why the two should not meet in a man's life if he has the weight and cares about the words.
Archibald MacLeish
#40. All conventional wisdom has an element of truth to it, but good design requires more than an element of truth - it requires an ensemble of correct assumptions and valid calculations.
Henry Petroski
#41. The first rule of a successful parasite? Myxoma's success in Australia suggests something different from that nugget of conventional wisdom I mentioned above. It's not Don't kill your host. It's Don't burn your bridges until after you've crossed them.
David Quammen
#42. A wise and clear-eyed book, Future Hype challenges the conventional wisdom about technological change and provides a fresh perspective on our so-called computer age.
Nicholas G. Carr
#43. a significant amount of Conventional Wisdom about healthy eating is marketing fodder that grossly distorts the fundamental truth that humans thrive on natural plant and animal foods or that relies on gimmicks to support the dogma of flawed, manipulated "research.
Mark Sisson
#44. Disruptors challenge assumptions. They shake the status quo. They are curious and creative. They adapt and improvise. They push the boundaries and shatter conventional wisdom. They'd rather forge new ground than blindly salute the flag of the past.
Josh Linkner
#45. Conventional wisdom is that you should find a job that matches your passion. I think this is backwards.
Seth Godin
#46. 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
#47. Conventional wisdom holds that setting a timetable for getting American troops out of Iraq would be a mistake.
Nick Clooney
#48. The body's a funny thing. It's so full of surprises that it makes conventional wisdom seem silly.
Pat Conroy
#49. And that's just the beginning. More and more, conventional wisdom says that the responsible thing is to make the unemployed suffer. And while the benefits from inflicting pain are an illusion, the pain itself will be all too real.
Paul Krugman
#50. I'm very proud of the Rome episode of 'No Reservations' because it violated all the conventional wisdom about making television. You're never, ever supposed to do a food or travel show in black and white.
Anthony Bourdain
#51. This theory rapidly became an article of faith because it appealed to the factors that, according to John Kenneth Galbraith, most contribute to the formation of conventional wisdom: the ease with which an idea may be understood and the degree to which it affects our personal well-being.
Steven D. Levitt
#52. Around '93, '94, the conventional wisdom about the Internet was that it was a toy for academics and researchers. So it was very, very underestimated for about two years.
Marc Andreessen
#53. Contrary to the tenets of conventional wisdom, viral ideas and campaigns were not first transmitted via the electronic media of the Internet age. Their ideological forebears lived and replicated in the host coffee-houses, inns and taverns of the early eighteenth-century.
Gavin John Adams
#54. Conventional wisdom in Galbraith's view must be simple, convenient, comfortable and comforting - though not necessarily true.
Steven D. Levitt
#55. Ferguson also takes a swipe at the conventional wisdom surrounding aspects of World War I. "The key to the Allies' victory was not an improvement in their ability to kill the enemy," Ferguson argues, "but rather a sudden increase in the willingness of German soldiers to surrender."5
Luke Williams
#56. [T]he myth that there was somehow a magic wand in the early 1980s to cure AIDS - a wand that Reagan deliberately refused to wave - is now almost conventional wisdom.
Andrew Sullivan
#57. When the conventional wisdom of physics seemed to conflict with an elegant theory of his, Einstein was inclined to question that wisdom rather than his theory, often to have his stubbornness rewarded.
Walter Isaacson
#58. Take a brilliant, creative social scientist, without any respect for conventional wisdom and you get Ellen Langer. She is a fantastic storyteller, and Counterclockwise is a fascinating story about the unexpected ways in which our minds and bodies are connected.
Dan Ariely
#59. 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
#60. Understanding the power of the underdog requires an effort. It requires standing up to conventional wisdom.
Malcolm Gladwell
#61. 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
#62. Don't accept any knowledge or conventional wisdom without critically questioning it first.
Debasish Mridha
#63. 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
#64. He doesn't agree with the conventional wisdom that says, "The world changed on September 11." Hauerwas says, "No, the world changed in 33 A.D. The question is how to narrate what happened on September 11 in light of what happened in 33 A.D.
Jim Wallis
#65. 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
#66. Most people see what they expect to see, what they want to see, what they've been told to see, what conventional wisdom tells them to see - not what is right in front of them in its pristine condition.
Vincent Bugliosi
#67. It is worth remembering one of the important lessons of the Buck story: a small number of zealous advocates can have an impact on the law that defies both science and conventional wisdom.
Paul A. Lombardo
#68. Conventional wisdom, fooled by our misleading "physical intuition", is that the real world is continuous, and that discrete models are necessary evils for approximating the "real" world, due to the innate discreteness of the digital computer.
Doron Zeilberger
#69. There's the conventional wisdom, of which I have none, where you get a record deal, you get a publicist, you get a campaign, and you do the tour, but none of that adds up to things like nuance and subtlety and dynamic.
Chris Robinson
#70. It's become glib political conventional wisdom in Washington that a massive spending plan will provide a parachute rescue for a cliff-diving economy - landing it safely and with strong enough legs to move toward a healthy future.
Nina Easton
#71. The biggest handicap in research is an ability to think outside the box. The handicap is being encumbered by all the conventional wisdom in a given field.
Aubrey De Grey
#72. NEVER accept "conventional wisdom" when it comes to finance. If others keep failing, why do you want to follow them?
Ziad K. Abdelnour
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. Influential people are never satisfied with the status quo. They're the ones who constantly ask, 'What if?' and 'Why not?' They're not afraid to challenge conventional wisdom, and they don't disrupt things for the sake of being disruptive; they do it to make things better.
Travis Bradberry
#76. There are no shortcuts to knowledge, especially knowledge gained from personal experience. Following conventional wisdom and relying on shortcuts can be worse than knowing nothing at all.
Ben Horowitz
#77. Analysts may be correct that the presidential election won't primarily turn on entitlements reform, but by choosing Paul Ryan as his running mate, Mitt Romney can, contrary to conventional wisdom, make it a winning issue and lay the foundation for a reform mandate when he wins.
David Limbaugh
#78. Jefferson attributes to a college professor and mentor his lifelong habit of questioning conventional wisdom.
John Ferling
#79. Conventional wisdom won't provide continual growth.
Jason Jennings
#80. I'm not so sure that the conventional wisdom makes any sense. Yes, it might be technically easy to track people and all that. But in the long-term I'm optimistic that we'll see the pendulum swing back in the other direction towards more privacy.
Rod Humble
#83. 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
#84. Conventional wisdom is invariably out of date. Because in the time it has taken to become conventional - to become what everyone believes - the world has moved on. Conventional wisdom is a remnant of the past.
Michael Crichton
#85. Perhaps the most widely accepted and damaging element of dietary Conventional Wisdom is that grains are healthy - the "staff of life" - as we've been led to believe our entire lives.
Mark Sisson
#86. 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
#87. I know conventional wisdom has always been to go to Europe, and I did that early on, and I tried it, but I realised pretty quickly if I wasn't playing, nothing else mattered - I wasn't going to be happy.
Landon Donovan
#88. All new ideas begin in a non-conforming mind that questions some tenet of the conventional wisdom.
Hyman Rickover
#89. What I want is to have people's notion of adulthood no longer be so defined by being a parent. There is some kind of conventional wisdom that you're not really a mature person until you become a parent.
Meghan Daum
#90. The only way to get ahead is to find errors in conventional wisdom.
Larry Ellison
#91. Conventional wisdom tells us not to dwell in the past. I believe, however, that we should hold hands with it.
Dana Glossbrenner
#92. One of the useful things about age is realizing conventional wisdom is often simply inertia with a candy coating of conformity.
Anna Quindlen
#93. History does not repeat itself. Nor does it unfold in cycles. The real future is contingent, rich beyond imagining, a perennial gobsmack, tragic and glorious in equal measure; the pundits' future, spun of 'conventional wisdom,' is only a sucker punch to that common-sense fact.
Rick Perlstein
#94. Conventional wisdom tells us we'll only be happier after a divorce if the marriage itself was a war zone.
Ariel Gore
#95. Conventional wisdom may not be wise.
Good fortune and bad luck do not exist.
Freedom of choice is predetermined.
Don't believe anything you read!
L. Anthony
#96. It is an unrepresentative city ... .They are so darn sure they are right on everything. The conventional wisdom in Manhattan, Bush believed, often failed to take opposing views into account except to dismiss such opinions as uninformed, prejudiced, and just plain wrong.
Jon Meacham
#97. If you leave home for a while ... you question the conventional wisdom you've grown up with. That doesn't mean you have to change your opinions or who you are, but it's good to ask the questions.
Molly Ringwald
#98. In the beginning, Adam was instructed to earn the bread by the sweat of his brow - not Eve. Contrary to conventional wisdom, a mother's place is in the home!
Ezra Taft Benson
#99. Here's conventional wisdom: Success makes you happy. Happiness permits you to be generous. In fact, it actually works like this: Generosity makes you happy. Happy people are more likely to be successful.
Seth Godin
#100. It is now conventional wisdom that Americans do not care why we went to war in Iraq, that it is enough that the world is better off without Saddam Hussein.
Adam Schiff
