Conventional-wisdom Quotes

When critics surrender to the prevailing orthodoxy, the author says they adopt the rhetoric of an oc...

Emily Dickinson sublimely unnames even the blanks.

One mark of originality that can win canonical status for a literary work is strangeness that we eit...

Shakespeare and his few peers invented all of us.

It has always been dangerous to institutionalize hope, and we no longer live in a society in which w...

The shortcomings of economics are not original error but uncorrected obsolescence. The obsolescence ...

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

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

And that's just the beginning. More and more, conventional wisdom says that the responsible thing is...

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

In a little town, there are many mouths which talk, and very few heads which think.

It is not only the hostility of others that may prevent us from questioning the status quo. Our will...

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

A whole nation cannot rise above itself.

Under the absolute sway of an individual despot the body was attacked in order to subdue the soul, a...

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

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