A'sound' banker, alas! is not one who foresees danger and avoidsit, but onewho, whenheisruined, isruined in a conventional and orthodox wayalong with his fellows, so that no one can really blame him.

-Keynes (of Tilton),John Maynard, 1st Baron
Essays in Persuasion.

We lost sight of one of the cardinal maxims of guerrilla war: the guerrilla wins if he does not lose. The conventional army loses if it does not win.

-Kissinger, HenryAlfred
  On the Vietnam War. In Foreign  Affairs,  Jan.

Her exotic daydreams do not prevent her from being small-town bourgeois at heart, clinging to conventional ideas orcommitting this or thatconventional violationof the conventional, adultery being a most conventional way to rise above the conventional.

-Nabokov,Vladimir
'Madame Bovary'. Collected in Lectures on Literature (published 1980).

   Ordinary life bypassed me, but I also bypassed it. It couldn't have been any other way.Conventional life and conventional people are not for me.

-O'Brien, Edna
In  Annalena Mc Afee (ed) Lives and Works: Profiles of Leading Novelists, Poets and Playwrights (2002).

The first argument that is brought against every new proposal departing from conventional lines is nearly always that it is impracticable.

-Shortlands
Fundamental Principles of Taxation, p.95.