And that’s just the beginning. More and more, conventional wisdom says that the responsible thing is to make the unemployed suffer. And while the benefits from inflicting pain are an illusion, the pain itself will...

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...

All literature becomes a sacred text.

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

It is not only the hostility of others that may prevent us from questioning the status quo. Our will to doubt can be just as powerfully sapped by an internal sense that societal conventions must...

When your efforts run in the face of conventional wisdom and accepted mastery, persistence can look like madness. If you succeed in the end, this extreme originality reformulates into a new level of mastery, sometimes...

Convention (is) so often a mask for injustice.

No one ever made more trouble than gentle Jesus meek and mild.

The shortcomings of economics are not original error but uncorrected obsolescence. The obsolescence has occurred because what is convenient has become sacrosanct. Anyone who attacks such ideas must seem to be a trifle self-confident and...

In every southerner, beneath the veneer of clichés lies a much deeper motherlode of cliché. But even cliché is overlaid with enormous power when a child is involved.

What is carved on rocks were away in time. What is told from mouth to mouth will live forever.

Conclusions that philosophers first establish by way of torturous reasoning have a way, over time, of leaking into shared knowledge.