Against Conventional Quotes

We are strange beings, we seem to go free, but we go in chains - chains of training, custom, convention, association, environment - in a word, Circumstance, and against these bonds the strongest of us struggle in vain.

Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality.

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 may not always make sense, so that's why I need to trust and obey the One who inspired them.

Poland is one of the few countries that can afford to conduct a conventional monetary policy and that means we have to act against the buildup of imbalances in the economy.

Zen is the spirit of a man. Zen believes in his inner purity and goodness. Whatever is superadded or violently torn away, injures the wholesomeness of the spirit. Zen, therefore, is emphatically against all religious conventionalism.

The anarchist painter is not the one who will create anarchist pictures, but the one who will fight with all his individuality against official conventions.

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.

Thus, anybody who follows this nature and gives way its states will be led into quarrels and conflicts, and go against the conventions and rules of society, and will end up a criminal.

There is a kind of courtesy in skepticism.

It would be an offense against polite conventions to press our doubts too far.

We're up against the conventional thinking that says your ability to lead as president comes from longevity in Washington or proximity to the White House. But we know that real leadership is about candor and judgment and the ability to rally Americans from all walks of life around a common purpose, a higher purpose.

The worst crimes against humanity in the last half of the previous century and this century are carried out with conventional advanced weapons, upgraded daily by a greedy arms industry, super power's apathy and criminal ideologies. In the Middle East, Iran lags behind many other military powers in this respect.

Armenians, as a people that have survived the Genocide, have a moral duty towards mankind and history in the prevention of genocides. We have done and will continue to do our best to support the persistent implementation of the Genocide Convention. Genocide cannot concern only one people, because it is a crime against humanity.

Part of the heart of anarchy is, dare to go against the grain of the conventional ways of thinking about our realities. Anarchists have always gone against the grain, and that's been a place of hope.

What [American universities] need, and would much benefit from, is more Marxists, radicals, leftists - all terms conventionally applied to those who fight against exploitation, racism, sexism, and capitalism. We can never have too many of these, just as we can never have too few 'conservatives'.

A man, at least, is free; he can explore every passion, every land, overcome obstacles, taste the most distant pleasures. But a woman is continually thwarted. Inert and pliant at the same time, she must struggle against both the softness of her flesh and subjection to the law. Her will, like the veil tied to her hat by a string, flutters with every breeze; there is always some desire luring her on, some convention holding her back.

Yale's greatness carries an urgent need to guard against the fall of excellence into exclusivity, of refinement into preciousness, of elegance into class and convention.

How dwarfed against his manliness she sees the poor pretension, the wants, the aims, the follies, born of fashion and convention!

Do we want an Attorney General who will play politics with the law, play politics with the court and just play politics with international conventions designed to protect our troops? I do not want to play that kind of politics. I am going to vote against Alberto Gonzales.

As matters now stand, the combination of genocide, as conventionally understood, and crimes against humanity, seems sufficient to cover the criminality of political leaders, and the lethal consequences of totalising ideologies.

You need judgment, you need to utilize conventional resource-allocation analysis, you have to work backward from estimations of the market to the current investments and you have to do some benchmarking of your product and its potential against your competition.

Remember, the conventional wisdom is, "Yeah, you can do this like [Donald] Trump has done it during the primaries, buuuut once you get to the general, it's not about national votes. It's about states! It's about swing states. It's about battleground states. And you've gotta have targeted expenditures, great ads running against your opponent in those swing states."

Finally, this is one way to reconcile the delight in beauty with the bourgeois life. Aschenbach, on one reading, has spent virtually all of his adult life balancing his restrained homosexuality, which is bound together with his sensitivity to beauty and thus with his artistic vocation, against the demands of conventional society.

'Mediocre' tends to mean 'undistinguished', while snobs enjoy their distinguishing hallmarks of style - how they wear clothes, use words, where they go and gather and gossip. ...Whatever the circumstances the genius has put you into, the fact of individuality defends the soul against all class-action claims. No soul is mediocre, whatever your personal taste for conventionality, whatever your personal record of middling achievements.

It has to be absolutely believable. It's also going between images and scenes with nudity and sexuality that would be seen, in conventional terms, as kind of sexually exciting. It's up against things that are much more medical and gynecological, and notoriously we, as a culture and a society, have some issues with that kind of thing.

I like playing the social convention.

If you're in a period drama, there's always something dancing underneath the surface as a human - but then you always have to conform to the social conventions around you, and those two things get to be juxtaposed against each other. You're being human, but you're trapped within the social convention of the time.

Contrary to conventional military and game theory, the most effective offense is sometimes a direct attack against your political opponent's greatest strength - not his weaknesses - to place him immediately on the defensive.

I've been making films with almost no dialogue (laughs), so sound and music become a very powerful character to tell the story. It's almost like with sound and music and images, it's your tool to tell the story, especially when I decide to structure the film in a way that usually goes against the conventions of the three-act structure which most films are made out of.

People have (with the help of conventions) oriented all their solutions toward the easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must hold to what is difficult; everything alive holds to it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself in its own way and is characteristically and spontaneously itself, seeks at all costs to be so and against all opposition.

Female physicists, astronomers and mathematicians are up against more than 2,000 years of convention that has long portrayed these fields as inherently male.

In our time the blasphemies are threadbare.

Pessimism is now patently, as it always was essentially, more commonplace than piety. Profanity is now more than an affectation - it is a convention. The curse against God is Exercise I in the primer of minor poetry.

The Adlerians, in the name of "individual psychology," take the side of society against the individual. ... Adler's later thought succumbs to the worst of his earlier banalization. It is conventional, practical, and moralistic. "Our science ... is based on common sense." Common sense, the half-truths of a deceitful society, is honored as the honest truths of a frank world.

Oils of cinnamon and eucalyptus are as powerful against some microorganisms as conventional antibiotics, and are especially effective against flus. Sandalwood oil from Mysore, India, is not only a classic perfume oil but is also a traditional remedy for sore throats and laryngitis. Lavender oil, so often used in toilet waters and scented sachets, has a dramatic healing action on burns.

Israel will not tolerate a situation in which Iran has effective control of non-conventional weapons that can be used directly against the state of Israel.

The masses will not vote for their own upliftment in a higher order of society.

This has to be accomplished without their support and request, despite them and indeed against them. It is absurd to pivot your whole project, as does a conventional party, on the submission of change to the decision of those who so need to be changed. You might as well make the case for law and order conditional on the approval of the criminals.