“Our best theories are not only truer than common sense, they make more sense than common sense…”
The Fabric of Reality (1997)
“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.”
—
Lawrence Lessig
,
book
Free Culture
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.
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Lawrence Lessig 71
American academic, political activist. 1961Related quotes
Introduction
Free Culture (2004)
Context: I believe it would be right for common sense to revolt against the extreme claims made today on behalf of "intellectual property." What the law demands today is increasingly as silly as a sheriff arresting an airplane for trespass. But the consequences of this silliness will be much more profound.
“Preservation of our environment is not a liberal or conservative challenge, it's common sense.”
Ronald Reagan
(1911–2004) American politician, 40th president of the United States (in office from 1981 to 1989)
State of the Union address http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=40205 (25 January 1984)
1980s, First term of office (1981–1985)
“That seems to us to be the common sense of the matter; and common sense often makes good law.”
William O. Douglas
(1898–1980) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States
Writing for the court, Peak v. United States, 353 U.S. 43 (1957)
Judicial opinions
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)
Clive James
(1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist
“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
William Thomson
(1824–1907) British physicist and engineer
Quoted in Life of Lord Kelvin (1910) by Silvanus Phillips Thompson