Common Quotes - Page 13

• No race of kings has ever presented above one man of common sense in twenty generations.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Kings, Men, Race

  Thomas Jefferson (1829). “Memoirs, correspondence and private papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. by T.J. Randolph”

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• I learned have, not to despise,What ever thing seemes small in common eyes.

  Edmund Spenser

  Eye, Despise

  Edmund Spenser (1822). “The poems of Edmund Spenser”, p.252

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• The richest author that ever grazed the common of literature.

  Samuel Johnson

  Literature

  Dr John Campbell, in James Boswell 'The Life of Samuel Johnson' (1791) vol. 1, p. 418 n. 1 (1 July 1763)

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• Among the words that can be all things to all men, the word "race" has a fair claim to being the most common, most ambiguous and most explosive. No one today would deny that it is one of the great catchwords about which ink and blood are spilled in reckless quantities. Yet no agreement seems to exist about what race means.

  Jacques Barzun

  Mean, Men, Race

  Jacques Barzun (1965). “Race: a study in superstition”

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• On the one hand, society needs a common faith and vigorous institutions with the power to coerce; and on the other, the individual as a human soul or as the bearer of a new and possibly saving heresy, must be free. It is difficult enough to reconcile these two needs, but the problem holds another hazard: the need of action under the pressure of time.

  Jacques Barzun

  Hands, Two, Soul

  "Bernard Shaw in Twilight". The Kenyon Review, 1943.

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• God hath given to mankind a common library, His creatures; to every man a proper book, himself being an abridgment of all others. If thou read with understanding, it will make thee a great master of philosophy, and a true servant of the divine Author: if thou but barely read, it will make thee thine own wise man and the Author's fool.

  Francis Quarles

  Wise, Philosophy, Book

  Francis Quarles (1844). “Enchiridion Institutions, Essays and Maxims, political, moral & divine. Divided into four centuries. By Francis Quarles”, p.75

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• The Adlerians, in the name of "individual psychology," take the side of society against the individual. ... Adler's later thought succumbs to the worst of his earlier banalization. It is conventional, practical, and moralistic. "Our science ... is based on common sense." Common sense, the half-truths of a deceitful society, is honored as the honest truths of a frank world.

  Alfred Adler

  Names, Common Sense, Psychology

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• To complain of the age we live in, to murmur at the present possessors of power, to lament the past, to conceive extravagant hopes of the future, are the common dispositions of the greatest part of mankind.

  Edmund Burke

  Past, Age, Complaining

  'Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents' (1770) p. 4

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• Debased men, but they all had something in common: They showed a keen regard for virtue, and tried to dress themselves in that costume. Hypocrisy, for all its bad reputation, at least showed a decent respect for goodness.

  Orson Scott Card

  Men, Hypocrisy, Dresses

  Orson Scott Card (1996). “Alvin Journeyman: The Tales of Alvin Maker”, p.256, Macmillan

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• The only thing that will redeem mankind is cooperation ... it is common to wish well to oneself, but in our technically unified world, wishing well to oneself is sure to be futile unless it is combined with wishing well to others.

  Bertrand Russell

  Wish, World, Cooperation

  Bertrand Russell, Andrew G. Bone (2003). “Man's Peril, 1954-55”, p.12, Psychology Press

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• You, your families, your friends and your countries are to be exterminated by the common decision of a few brutal but powerful men. To please these men, all the private affections, all the public hopes, all that has been achieved in art, and knowledge and thought and all that might be achieved hereafter is to be wiped out forever. Our ruined lifeless planet will continue for countless ages to circle aimlessly round the sun unredeemed by the joys and loves, the occasional wisdom and the power to create beauty which have given value to human life.

  Bertrand Russell

  Country, Art, Powerful

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• I myself hate that old Hemingwayesque paradigm of the writer as prizefighter and I have tried hard to create an alternate one for myself. When Anne Sexton admonished me, "We are all writing God's poem," I took it to mean there should be no competition between writers because we are all involved in a common project, a common prayer. But to Gore's and Norman's generation, particularly those male writers who served in the second world war, the prizefighter paradigm remains.

  Erica Jong

  Prayer, War, Hate

  "Into the Lion's Den". www.theguardian.com. October 26, 2000.

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• As the Deity has given us Greeks all other blessings in moderation, so our moderation gives us a kind of wisdom which is timid, in all likelihood, and fit for common people, not one which is kingly and splendid. This wisdom, such as it is, observing that human life is ever subject to all sorts of vicissitudes, forbids us to be puffed up by the good things we have, or to admire a man's felicity while there is still time for it to change.

  Solon

  Men, Blessing, Giving

  "Solon". Book by Plutarch, ch. 27; translation by Bernadotte Perrin, 1497.

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• I'm always astounded at the way we automatically look at what divides and separates us. We never look at what people have in common. If you see it, black and white people, both sides look to see the differences, they don't look at what they have together. Men and women, and old and young, and so on. And this is a disease of the mind, the way I see it. Because in actual fact, men and women have much more in common than they are separated.

  Doris Lessing

  Black And White, Men, Differences

  "A Notorious Life". Interview with Dwight Garner, www.salon.com. November 11, 1997.

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• Often in this our life do we begin by cursing men and end by loving them. A sense of the common fallibility of all flesh makes us kin. No man is lovable who is invincible.

  Neville Cardus

  Men, Flesh, Lovable

  Neville Cardus (2012). “Cardus on Cricket: A selection from the cricket writings of Sir Neville Cardus”, p.110, Souvenir Press

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• I awoke from The Sickness at the age of forty-five, calm and sane, and in reasonably good health except for a weakened liver and the look of borrowed flesh common to all who survive The Sickness... When I speak of drug addiction I do not refer to keif, marijuana or any preparation of hashish, mescaline, Banisteriopsis caapi, LSD6, Sacred Mushrooms or any other drugs of the hallucinogen group... There is no evidence that the use of any hallucinogen results in physical dependence.

  William S. Burroughs

  Marijuana, Mushrooms, Addiction

  "Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness". William S. Burroughs' introduction to his book "Naked Lunch" (pp. 199-201), 1960 edition.

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• It may be expecting too much to expect most intellectuals to have common sense, when their whole life is based on their being uncommon -- that is, saying things that are different from what everyone else is saying. There is only so much genuine originality in anyone. After that, being uncommon means indulging in pointless eccentricities or clever attempts to mock or shock.

  Thomas Sowell

  Clever, Mean, Common Sense

  Thomas Sowell (2013). “Ever Wonder Why?: and Other Controversial Essays”, p.328, Hoover Press

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• Is an institution always a man's shadow shortened in the sun, the lowest common denominator of everybody in it?

  Randall Jarrell

  Men, Shadow, Sun

  1954 Pictures from an Institution, pt.5, ch.9.

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• I don't need to praise anything so justly famous as Frost's observation of and empathy with everything in Nature from a hornet to a hillside; and he has observed his own nature, one person's random or consequential chains of thoughts and feelings and perceptions, quite as well. (And this person, in the poems, is not the "alienated artist" cut off from everybody who isn't, yum-yum, another alienated artist; he is someone like normal people only more so - a normal person in the less common and more important sense of normal.)

  Randall Jarrell

  Cutting, Artist, People

  "Poetry and the Age" by Randall Jarrell, Vintage paperback, (p. 29), 1955.

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• (The processes are) doubly ruinous: they impoverish the earth by hastily removing, for the benefit of a few generations, the common resources which, once expended and dissipated, can never be restored; and second, in its technique, its habits, its processes, the paleotechnic period is equally inimical to the earth considered as a human habitat, by its destruction of the beauty of the landscape, its ruining of streams, its pollution of drinking water, its filling the air with a finely divided carboniferous deposit, which chokes both life and vegetation.

  Lewis Mumford

  Drinking, Air, Water

  "The Theory and Practice of Regionalism". The Sociological Review, vol. 20, nos. 1 and 2, 1928.

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• The most uncommon form of intelligence is common sense.

  Evan Esar

  Common Sense, Form, Uncommon

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• There's only one kind of common sense but a thousand varieties of stupidity.

  Evan Esar

  Common Sense, Stupidity, Kind

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• Common sense is usually lack of imagination, and imagination is usually lack of common sense.

  Evan Esar

  Common Sense, Imagination, Lack Of Common Sense

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• Barring love and war, few enterprises are undertaken with such abandon, or by such diverse individuals, or with so paradoxical a mixture of appetite and altruism, as that group of avocations known as outdoor recreation. It is, by common consent, a good thing for people to get back to nature. But wherein lies the goodness, and what can be done to encourage its pursuit?

  Aldo Leopold

  Lying, War, People

  Aldo Leopold (1989). “A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There”, p.165, Oxford University Press, USA

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• What had really caused the women's movement was the additional years of human life. At the turn of the century women's life expectancy was forty-six; now it was nearly eighty. Our groping sense that we couldn't live all those years in terms of motherhood alone was "the problem that had no name." Realizing that it was not some freakish personal fault but our common problem as women had enabled us to take the first steps to change our lives.

  Betty Friedan

  Motherhood, Years, Names

  "The Fountain of Age". Book by Betty Friedan, Preface, 1993.

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