Received Wisdom Quotes

There is nothing so wrong as accepting a thing merely because men who have done things say it should be so.

Real history is far more complex and interesting than the simplistic summaries presented in Wikipedia articles. Knowing this allows you to question received wisdom, to challenge 'facts' 'everybody' knows to be true, and to imagine worlds and characters worthy of our rich historical heritage and our complex selves.

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.

One can be certain that every generally held idea, every received notion, will be idiocy because it has been able to appeal to the majority

It should be possible to say that there really is such as thing as "genius" and that what it is, is precisely a surprising and unexpected movement away from collective patterns of behavior and received wisdom.

Most non-readers are nothing but an agglomeration of third-hand opinion and blindly received wisdom.

I am opposed, naturally, to regurgitating anecdote or any other form of received wisdom, unless it is characterized as such.

Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake.

The differences between the received wisdom, the standard version of events, and the facts on the ground may be subtle or they may be stark, even profound.

I'm someone who's done the opposite of whatever the received wisdom is, to keep your career going into your 50s.

As with many other folk beliefs, 'feng-shui' undoubtedly incorporates some scientifically correct observation or received wisdom based on direct experience of natural phenomena; but it needs to be dealt with skeptically as a credible system of thought. Some feng-shui prescriptions can certainly lead to desirable results.