A Quote by John Kenneth Galbraith

The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events.

John Kenneth Galbraith

Quote Topics

Wisdom Conventional Conventional Wisdom Enemy Events Ideas March

Quote Author

John Kenneth Galbraith
American - Economist
October 15, 1908 - April 29, 2006

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

Conventional wisdom is no wisdom at all. Conventional wisdom is taking somebody else's word for the way things are It's the followers of this world who rely on assumption. Not the leaders.

Richard Marcinko

Conventional wisdom is invariably out of date.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

Wisdom and policy dictate that we must do as destiny demands and keep peace with the irresistible march of events.

Napoleon Bonaparte

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

I'm particularly interested in black swan events: unprecedented surprises that destroy the conventional wisdom about how the world works.

Paolo Bacigalupi

All new ideas begin in a non-conforming mind that questions some tenet of the conventional wisdom.

Hyman Rickover

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

New ideas that fly in the face of conventional wisdom of the day are always greeted with doubt and scorn, even fear.

John C. Bogle

The conventional wisdom is often wrong. Crime didn't keep soaring in the 1990s, money alone doesn't win elections, and - surprise - drinking eight glasses of water a day has never actually been shown to do a thing for your health. Conventional wisdom is often shoddily formed and devilishly difficult to see through, but it can be done.

Malcolm Gladwell

Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom. The surest path to wisdom is a liberal education.

Alfred Whitney Griswold

The line that I am urging as today's conventional wisdom is not a denial of consciousness. It is often called, with more reason, arepudiation of mind. It is indeed a repudiation of mind as a second substance, over and above body. It can be described less harshly as an identification of mind with some of the faculties, states, and activities of the body. Mental states and events are a special subclass of the states and events of the human or animal body.

Willard Van Orman Quine

Conventional wisdom tells us to avoid taking unalterable action while at a low point in life. I have never been conventional.

Therese Fowler

Just look at what is right in front of you. People don't do that. They see what they expect to see, what they want to see, what conventional wisdom tells them to see. They only hear the music and not the lyrics of human events.