Source: Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (1963), p. 352
Context: It is often asserted that discussion is only possible between people who have a common language and accept common basic assumptions. I think that this is a mistake. All that is needed is a readiness to learn from one's partner in the discussion, which includes a genuine wish to understand what he intends to say. If this readiness is there, the discussion will be the more fruitful the more the partner's backgrounds differ.
“Among the most striking things that I have learned is how much we have in common. I’ve sat down with people everywhere, discussing what was in their hearts and on their minds. And it doesn’t take long to find commonality, which is often overlooked, ignored, dismissed, and rejected otherwise.”
Frontlines and Frontiers: Making Human Rights a Human Reality (December 6, 2012) http://www.state.gov/secretary/20092013clinton/rm/2012/12/201618.htm
Secretary of State (2009–2013)
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Hillary Clinton 312
American politician, senator, Secretary of State, First Lady 1947Related quotes
“I learned have, not to despise,
What ever thing seemes small in common eyes.”
Visions of the Worlds Vanitie (1591), line 69
Quote in his letter to Anthon van Rappard, from Nuenen, The Netherlands, September 1885, in 'Van Gogh Letters' http://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let528/letter.html
1880s, 1885
“How to find pleasure in common things.”
Four Minute Essays Vol. 7 (1919), A School for Living
“If all things are in common among friends, the most precious is Wisdom.”
As quoted in Giordano Bruno : His Life and Thought (1950) by Dorothea Waley Singer http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/bruno03.htm#CH3
Context: If all things are in common among friends, the most precious is Wisdom. What can Juno give which thou canst not receive from Wisdom? What mayest thou admire in Venus which thou mayest not also contemplate in Wisdom? Her beauty is not small, for the lord of all things taketh delight in her. Her I have loved and diligently sought from my youth up.
“What we like to think of ourselves and what we really are rarely have much in common….”
Source: The Drawing of the Three
Chris Chase, "A Talk With the Unsinkable Barbara Walters", New York Magazine (March 25, 1974), Vol. 7, No. 12, p. 65.
2020s
Source: "Information and the Cultural Revolution" https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/information-cultural-revolution-live-not-by-lies/ (January 2021), The American Conservative
Source: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast