Conventional Wisdom Quotes

Don’t accept any knowledge or conventional wisdom without critically questioning it first.

~ Debasish Mridha

I like uncovering the cultural prejudices I didn't even know.

~ A.j. Jacobs

Sex education in the modern manner has been well-described as plumbing for hedonists.

~ George F. Will

It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.

~ Jonathan Swift

[Conventional wisdom] very heavily tends to reflect the preferences and the interests of the elite.

~ Paul Krugman

Emily Dickinson sublimely unnames even the blanks.

~ Harold Bloom

A whole nation cannot rise above itself.

~ Alexis De Tocqueville

A lot of people here some South in your mouth, and they automatically think you're dumb. They think if you talk funny, you are funny. – Lloyd Hand

~ David Pietrusza

Rehnquist was just reflecting his shifting role, from outsider to the institutional embodiment of the Court.

~ Jeffrey Toobin

One mark of originality that can win canonical status for a literary work is strangeness that we either never altogether assimilate, or that becomes such a given that we are blinded to its idiosyncrasies.

~ Harold Bloom

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

~ Antonin Scalia

When it comes to anniversaries, the publishing industry usually resembles distant relatives, readiest with gifts that are redundant or farcical.

~ Anthony Paletta

Insight is the deep intuitive understanding of things, and it often breaks through the conventional wisdom.

~ Pearl Zhu

Shakespeare and his few peers invented all of us.

~ Harold Bloom

Why study what the world thinks? I believe this practice will actually make us more gracious and merciful. Engaged in interactions with worldlings, we are likely to see each person and each situation individually and to allow them to infuriate us. But, stepping back to see the world's pattern of thought rather than a particular instance in which we are wronged, we can gain perspective. By seeing this lost person's dealings as another example of blindness to Your Truth and of what Paul calls vain imaginations, we are more likely to turn our assertiveness to prayer rather than maneuvering for human advantage.

~ Brian Eshleman

Malignant phenomena do not come out of a golden age.

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

Under the absolute sway of an individual despot the body was attacked in order to subdue the soul, and the soul escaped the blows which were directed against it and rose superior to the attempt; but such is not the course adopted by tyranny in democratic republics; there the body is left free, and the soul is enslaved.

~ Alexis De Tocqueville

Laws are always unstable unless they are founded upon the manners of the nation, manners are the only durable and resisting power in a people.

~ Alexis De Tocqueville

The greatest difficulty in antiquity with that of altering the law; among the moderns, it is that of altering the manners.

~ Alexis De Tocqueville

Your blanks have been filled in far differently from those of a child grown up in the filth and poverty

~ John Howard Griffin

In the context of today, this WAS heroism.

~ John Howard Griffin

By our day, self-restraint was considered madness.

~ Mark Sayers

He did not consider public opinion to be accurate at long range.

~ Stephen Crane

I find myself constantly taking apart be taken-for-granted.

~ Rebekah Nathan

Conclusions that philosophers first establish by way of torturous reasoning have a way, over time, of leaking into shared knowledge.

~ Rebecca Goldstein

What is carved on rocks were away in time. What is told from mouth to mouth will live forever.

~ Vietnamese Saying

The author says his young son, adopted from South Korea, occasionally burps and says thank you but otherwise is doing all right.

~ Jim Bouton

In every southerner, beneath the veneer of clichés lies a much deeper motherlode of cliché. But even cliché is overlaid with enormous power when a child is involved.

~ Pat Conroy

When your efforts run in the face of conventional wisdom and accepted mastery, persistence can look like madness. If you succeed in the end, this extreme originality reformulates into a new level of mastery, sometimes even genius; if you fail in the end, you remain a madman in the eyes of others, and maybe even yourself. When you are in the midst of the journey…there’s really no way of knowing which one you are.” (p.129)

~ Hilary Austen

A good therapy helps you develop a sense of irony about your life so that when you start to repeat old and unhelpful patterns, something within you says, There you go again; let's call this to a halt. You can do something different. Often the first step toward doing something different is developing the capacity to not act, to stay still and reflect.

~ Sherry Turkle

When critics surrender to the prevailing orthodoxy, the author says they adopt the rhetoric of an occupied country, one that expects no liberation from liberation.

~ Harold Bloom

It was easier to come to maturity when there were more well-defined philosophical options.

~ David Brooks

It is not only the hostility of others that may prevent us from questioning the status quo. Our will to doubt can be just as powerfully sapped by an internal sense that societal conventions must have a sound basis, even if we are not sure exactly what this may be, because they have been adhered to by a great many people for a long time. It seems implausible that our society could be gravely mistaken in its beliefs, and at the same time, that we would be alone in noticing the fact. We stifle our doubts, and follow the flock, because we cannot conceive of ourselves as pioneers of hitherto unknown difficult truths. It is for help in overcoming our meekness that we can turn to the philosopher.

~ Alain De Botton

That he survived, and indeed returned to government, was one of man's occasional triumphs over medicine.

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

It has always been dangerous to institutionalize hope, and we no longer live in a society in which we will be allowed to institutionalize memory.

~ Harold Bloom

One paper boasted that its subscription and advertising numbers proved that America did not need the social change it rival paper advocated.

~ Harold Holzer

The usefulness of a man or woman of God relies on the ability to remain distinct.

~ Kevin Thoman

No one ever made more trouble than gentle Jesus meek and mild.

~ James Gillis

The shortcomings of economics are not original error but uncorrected obsolescence. The obsolescence has occurred because what is convenient has become sacrosanct. Anyone who attacks such ideas must seem to be a trifle self-confident and even aggressive. The man who makes his entry by leaning against an infirm door gets an unjustified reputation for violence. Something is to be attributed to the poor state of the door.

~ John Kenneth Galbraith

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