conventional-wisdom

Why study what the world thinks? I believe this practice will actually make us more gracious and merciful. Engaged in interactions with worldlings, we are likely to see each person and each situation individually and to allow them to infuriate us. But, stepping back to see the world's pattern of thought rather than a particular instance in which we are wronged, we can gain perspective. By seeing this lost person's dealings as another example of blindness to Your Truth and of what Paul calls vain imaginations, we are more likely to turn our assertiveness to prayer rather than maneuvering for human advantage.

Shakespeare and his few peers invented all of us.

Insight is the deep intuitive understanding of things, and it often breaks through the conventional wisdom.

When it comes to anniversaries, the publishing industry usually resembles distant relatives, readiest with gifts that are redundant or farcical.

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

One mark of originality that can win canonical status for a literary work is strangeness that we either never altogether assimilate, or that becomes such a given that we are blinded to its idiosyncrasies.

Rehnquist was just reflecting his shifting role, from outsider to the institutional embodiment of the Court.

A lot of people here some South in your mouth, and they automatically think you're dumb. They think if you talk funny, you are funny. _ Lloyd Hand

A whole nation cannot rise above itself.

Emily Dickinson sublimely unnames even the blanks.

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

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

Sex education in the modern manner has been well-described as plumbing for hedonists.

I like uncovering the cultural prejudices I didn't even know.

Don__ accept any knowledge or conventional wisdom without critically questioning it first.

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

That's the way progress works: the more we build up these vast repertoires of scientific and technological understanding, the more we conceal them.

The witch-hunt narrative is now the conventional wisdom about these cases. That view is so widely endorsed and firmly entrenched that so widely endorsed and firmly entrenched that there would seem to be nothing left to say about these cases. But a close examination of the witch hunt canon leads to some unsettling questions: Why is there so little in the way of academic scholarship about these cases? Almost all of the major witch-hunt writings have been in magazines, often without any footnotes to verify or assess the claims made. Why hasn't anyone writing about these cases said anything about how difficult they are to research? There are so many roadblocks and limitations to researching these cases that it would seem incumbent on any serious writer to address the limitations of data sources. Many of these cases seem to have been researched in a manner of days or weeks. Nevertheless, the cases are described in a definitive way that belies their length and complexity, along with the inherent difficulty in researching original trial court documents. This book is based on the first systematic examination of court records in these cases.