
“There ain't no man can avoid being born average. But there ain't no man got to be common.”
"Words of the Week" Jet (Sep 4, 1958)
“There ain't no man can avoid being born average. But there ain't no man got to be common.”
"Words of the Week" Jet (Sep 4, 1958)
“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
“Our best theories are not only truer than common sense, they make more sense than common sense…”
The Fabric of Reality (1997)
Quoted in Life of Lord Kelvin (1910) by Silvanus Phillips Thompson
The Atheist's Guide to Reality (2011)
Context: There is, however, a much more convincing argument that needs to be put on the table before we really begin turning common sense upside down. It is the overwhelming reason to prefer science to ordinary beliefs, common sense, and direct experience. Science is just common sense continually improving itself, rebuilding itself, until it is no longer recognizable as common sense. It is easy to miss this fact about science without studying a lot of history of science—and not the stories about science, but the succession of actual scientific theories and how common sense was both their mother and their midwife.
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.