In order to stand well in the eyes of the community, it is necessary to come up to a certain, somewhat indefinite, conventional standard of wealth.
Thorstein Veblen

In our day the conventional element in literature is elaborately disguised by a law of copyright pretending that every work of art is an invention distinctive enough to be patented.
Northrop Frye

In the perception of the incongruous stimuli, the recognition process is temporarily thwarted and exhibits characteristics which are generally not observable in the recognition of more conventional stimuli.
Jerome Bruner

Infelicity is an ill to which all acts are heir which have the general character of ritual or ceremonial, all conventional acts.
J. L. Austin

Is it the factitious and the conventional that most surely succeed on earth and in the course of life?
Paul Cezanne

It is conventional to call "monster" any blending of dissonant elements. I call "monster" every original inexhaustible beauty.
Alfred Jarry

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.
Adam Schiff

It may sound terrible, but I often say that the military saved me from a conventional life in the United States and I've never really thanked them for it, because I haven't exactly been pro-military in my work.
Robert Jay Lifton

It will be a pity if women in the more conventional mould are to be phased out, for there will never be anyone to go home to.
Anita Brookner

Like everything genuine, its inner life guarantees its truth. All works of art created by truthful minds without regard for the work's conventional exterior remain genuine for all times.
Franz Marc

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

Many people have their reputations as reporters and analysts because they are on television, batting around conventional wisdom. A lot of these people have never reported a story.
Bob Woodward

Most human beings today waste some 25 to 30 years of their lives before they break through the actual and conventional lies which surround them.
Isadora Duncan

My religion centers in different areas than what's considered conventional religion.
Jack Kevorkian

No one who has lived even for a fleeting moment for something other than life in its conventional sense and has experienced the exaltation that this feeling produces can then renounce his new freedom so easily.
Andre Breton

Nothing is so threatening to conventional values as a man who does not want to work or does not want to work at a challenging job, and most people are disturbed if a man in a well- paying job indicates ambivalence or dislike toward it.
Alice S. Rossi

Of course there are regrets. I shall regret always that I found my own authentic voice in politics. I was too conservative, too conventional. Too safe, too often. Too defensive. Too reactive. Later, too often on the back foot.
John Major

One of the reasons, surely, why women have been credited with less perfect veracity than men is that the burden of conventional falsehood falls chiefly on them.
Katharine Fullerton Gerould

Osama bin Laden, the person, more likely serves the function of a stand-in. Compare the new terrorists with partisans or conventional terrorists in Israel. These people often fight in a decentralized manner in small, autonomous units, too.
Jurgen Habermas

People always blame the girl; she should have said no. A monosyllable, but conventional wisdom has always been that boys can't manage it.
Anna Quindlen