Top 1200 Conventional Wisdom Quotes & Sayings

If your writing collides with the conventional wisdom, there's going to be some kind of friction.

Question everything, even if it represents generations of conventional wisdom.

Conventional wisdom would have one believe.

The only way to get ahead is to find errors in conventional wisdom.

One of the toughest battles in intelligence is combating conventional wisdom.

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.

The challenge with a candidate like Donald Trump is he's not a conventional candidate, and he doesn't run a conventional campaign, and he doesn't answer questions in a conventional way.

'Focusing' is no conventional repackaging of self-help wisdom. It is at once a manual and a philosophy. It talks about the body's wisdom, the steps of the focusing technique, how to discover the richness in others by learning to listen.

Economists often like startling theorems, results which seem to run counter to conventional wisdom.

Conventional wisdom holds that setting a timetable for getting American troops out of Iraq would be a mistake.

An expert must be BOLD if he hopes to alchemize his homespun theory into conventional wisdom.

I’ve never agreed with the conventional wisdom that ‘actors are great liars.’ If more people understood the acting process, the goals of good actors, the conventional wisdom would be ‘actors are terrible liars,’ because only bad actors lie on the job. The good ones hate fakery and avoid manufactured emotion at all costs. Any script is enough of a lie anyway. (What experience does any actor have with flying a spacecraft? Killing someone?) What’s called for, what actors are hired for, is to bring reality to the arbitrary.

No one has a monopoly on truth, and science continues to advance. Yesterday's heresies may be tomorrow's conventional wisdom.

One of the useful things about age is realizing conventional wisdom is often simply inertia with a candy coating of conformity.

It's really important, whether you're a conservative or a liberal, to always challenge the conventional wisdom, which is what I've tried to do in all my work.

Innovation for holders of conventional wisdom is not novelty but annihilation.

I don't believe any experiment until it is confirmed by theory. I find this is a witty inversion of "conventional" wisdom.

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

The secret of literature, which conventional people don't guess, is that writers are forever looking for the surprising revelation - not for reinforcement of collective wisdom.

I reject most conventional wisdom.

The conventional wisdom is that if you are gay, you cannot play the romantic straight lead in a movie.

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!

Until there are tangible metrics for quantifying the real value of a token's utility, the gap between value and valuation will continue to defy conventional wisdom and conventional valuation methods.

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.

Conventional wisdom is not always the best wisdom.

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.

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.

Conventional wisdom is so scary because what if everybody's wrong?

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

Acknowledge the complexity of the world and resist the impression that you easily understand it. People are too quick to accept conventional wisdom, because it sounds basically true and it tends to be reinforced by both their peers and opinion leaders, many of whome have never looked at whether the facts support the received wisdom. It's a basic fact of life that many things "everybody knows" turn out to be wrong.

Never accept ultimatums, conventional wisdom, or absolutes.

Doubt the conventional wisdom unless you can verify it with reason and experiment.

There was a period of 10 years where the conventional wisdom was Black shows don't sell overseas, therefore nobody is interested.

I've always shied away from conventional wisdom, though I know the power of it.

Conventional wisdom can get us into so much trouble, especially as artists.

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

Ramesh Ponnuru and others say Obama is a conventional liberal. But conventional liberals don't come out for the release of the Lockerbie bomber. Conventional liberals don't return the bust of Winston Churchill from the Oval Office. Conventional liberals don't block oil drilling in America while subsidizing oil drilling in Brazil.

Skepticism requires disbelief and curiosity, not conformity to conventional wisdom. There's no science here. This is pure politics.

We just don't subscribe to the conventional wisdom that you can't have an action series led by a female character. It's kinda nonsense to us.

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

Mainstream media tend to just mouth the conventional wisdom, to see everything through the filter of right and left.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I think in conventional magazine wisdom, you need to have a redesign every decade or so.

Conventional wisdom tells us we'll only be happier after a divorce if the marriage itself was a war zone.

Never accept conventional wisdom when it comes to finance. If others keep failing, why do you want to follow them?

Conventional wisdom is not to put all of your eggs in one basket. 80/20 wisdom is to choose a basket carefully, load all your eggs into it, and then watch it like a hawk.

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

When you're used to being prepared to reject conventional wisdom, it leaves you open to learn more.

Swim upstream. Go the other way. Ignore the conventional wisdom.

Doubt the conventional wisdom unless you can verify it with reason and experiment

In the conventional wisdom of conservatives, the modern search for security is regularly billed as the greatest single threat to economic progress.

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.

The conventional wisdom is often wrong.

The most important lesson of New Labour is this: Every time we made progress we did it by challenging the conventional wisdom.

Challenge conventional wisdom. There is almost always a better way.

It's probably conventional wisdom now that you bring openness of markets only after the market has developed to a certain level.