quotations about common sense
Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Art
We know that the war against intelligence is always waged in the name of common sense.
ROLAND BARTHES
Mythologies
I don't profess to be profound, but I do lay claim to common sense.
CHARLES DICKENS
David Copperfield
Emotion makes the world go round, but common sense keeps it from going too fast.
ANONYMOUS
Good hard-pan sense is the thing that will wash well, wear well, iron out without wrinkling, and take starch without cracking. Sense Quotes
JOSH BILLINGS
The Complete Works of Josh Billings
Common sense is judgment without reflection, shared by an entire class, an entire nation, or the entire human race.
GIAMBATTISTA VICO
The New Science
Many quite nefarious ideologies pass for common sense. For decades of American history, it was common sense in some quarters for white people to own slaves and for women not to vote.... If common sense sometimes preserves the social status quo, and that status quo sometimes treats unjust social hierarchies as natural, it makes good sense on such occasions to find ways of challenging common sense.
JUDITH BUTLER
"A 'Bad Writer' Bites Back", The New York Times, March 20, 1999
Common sense is genius dressed in its working-clothes.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
attributed, Day's Collacon
Success is more a function of consistent common sense than it is of genius.
AN WANG
Lessons: An Autobiography
Misprize common sense at your peril is my motto.
KINGSLEY AMIS
Stanley and the Women
No race of kings has ever presented above one man of common sense in twenty generations.
THOMAS JEFFERSON
letter to Benjamin Hawkins, Aug. 4, 1787
Common sense always speaks too late. Common sense is the guy who tells you you ought to have had your brakes relined last week before you smashed a front end this week. Common sense is the Monday morning quarterback who could have won the ball game if he had been on the team. But he never is. He's high up in the stands with a flask on his hip. Common sense is the little man in a gray suit who never makes a mistake in addition. But it's always somebody's else's money he's adding up.
RAYMOND CHANDLER
Playback
Common sense (which, in truth, is very uncommon) is the best sense I know of: abide by it; it will counsel you best.
PHILIP DORMER STANHOPE
The Elements of a Polite Education
Common-sense is part of the home-made ideology of those who have been deprived of fundamental learning, of those who have been kept ignorant.
JOHN BERGER
A Fortunate Man
It was not curiosity that killed the goose who laid the golden egg, but an insatiable greed that devoured common sense.
E. A. BUCCHIANERI
Brushstrokes of a Gadfly
Unless the materials involved can be traced back to the material of common sense concern there is nothing whatever for scientific concern to be concerned with.
JOHN DEWEY
"Common Sense and Science", The Journal of Philosophy, April 18, 1948
Common sense in an uncommon degree is what the world calls wisdom.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
Literary Remains
Common sense tells us that the world is flat, that the sun goes around the earth, that heavy bodies always fall faster than light bodies, that boats made of iron will sink.
STUART CHASE
The Proper Study of Mankind
Common sense is usually lack of imagination, and imagination is usually lack of common sense.
EVAN ESAR
20,000 Quips & Quotes
The free-thinking of one age is the common sense of the next.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
"God and the Bible"