Whenever I write about mental health and integrative therapies I am accused of being prejudiced against pharmaceuticals. So let me be clear - integrative medicine is the judicious application of both conventional and evidence-based natural therapies.
Conventional wisdom on government's role in inequality often has it backwards. Tax reforms have resulted in a more progressive federal income tax government transfer payments have become less progressive.
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.
What distinguishes the campaign finance issue from just about every other one being debated these days is that the two sides do not divide along conventional liberal/ conservative lines.
The facts of science are real enough and so are the techniques that scientists use and so are the technologies based on them. But the belief system that governs conventional scientific thinking is an act of faith.
The public has lost faith in the ability of Social Security and Medicare to provide for old age. They've lost faith in the banking system and in conventional medical insurance.
The world is put back by the death of every one who has to sacrifice the development of his or her peculiar gifts to conventionality.
It is conventional to call 'monster' any blending of dissonant elements. I call 'monster' every original inexhaustible beauty.
I am an unconventional beauty. I grew up in a high school where if you didn't have a nose job and money and if you weren't thin you weren't cool popular beautiful. I was always told that I wasn't pretty enough to be on television.
I think one of the things that language poets are very involved with is getting away from conventional ideas of beauty because those ideas contain a certain attitude toward women certain attitudes toward sex certain attitudes toward race etc.
The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed and the truly new is criticized with aversion.
The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.
I have two ideas for novels at the moment neither of them all that conventional but I'm not ready to choose between them yet let alone settle down to the process of writing.
Who knows what true loneliness is - not the conventional word but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion.