“Using, as an excuse, others’ failure of common sense is in itself a failure of common sense.”
Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 7
“That seems to us to be the common sense of the matter; and common sense often makes good law.”
Writing for the court, Peak v. United States, 353 U.S. 43 (1957)
Judicial opinions
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William O. Douglas 52
Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States 1898–1980Related quotes
“Our best theories are not only truer than common sense, they make more sense than common sense…”
The Fabric of Reality (1997)
Stanley Baldwin
(1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
Speech in Leeds (13 March 1925), quoted in On England, and Other Addresses (1926), p. 62.
1925
Context: We were not peculiarly impressed with speeches that talked of the glorious time that was coming after the war. We realised what the war meant in the world. We felt the foundations of civilisation in Europe cracking. We knew as business men that for a generation this country and the world would be as a whole far, far poorer, and we realised early the struggle that must result to repair the cracks in the foundations of our civilisation and to restore to the country that level of prosperity which she had enjoyed before the war. I think, too, many of us had little faith in supermen. I think that our experience in business had taught us that, as a matter of fact, there are no such things as supermen, and that we should have to rely on the innate common-sense, integrity, courage and faith of the common men and women of this country if we were to make good.
George William Foote
(1850–1915) British secularist and journal editor
"Christianity and Common Sense" http://www.ftarchives.net/foote/flowers/114commonsense.htm, p. 114
Flowers of Freethought (1893)
“Good intentions are useless in the absence of common-sense.”
Jami
(1414–1492) Persian poet
An argosy of fables, p. 240
about himself, Extracted from Baharīstān-e- Jami
Free Culture (2004)
Context: A simple idea blinds us, and under the cover of darkness, much happens that most of us would reject if any of us looked. So uncritically do we accept the idea of property in ideas that we don't even notice how monstrous it is to deny ideas to a people who are dying without them. So uncritically do we accept the idea of property in culture that we don't even question when the control of that property removes our ability, as a people, to develop our culture democratically. Blindness becomes our common sense. And the challenge for anyone who would reclaim the right to cultivate our culture is to find a way to make this common sense open its eyes.
So far, common sense sleeps. There is no revolt. Common sense does not yet see what there could be to revolt about.
Clive James
(1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist
