“Common sense is as rare as genius.”
“Success is more a function of consistent common sense than it is of genius.”
Lessons : An Autobiography (1986)
Source: June 2021, Outrage after Pakistan PM Imran Khan blames rape crisis on women https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jun/25/outrage-after-pakistan-pm-imran-khan-blames-crisis-on-women
“Aeschylus had a clear eye for the commonest things. His genius was only an enlarged common sense.”
January 29, 1840
Journals (1838-1859)
Context: Aeschylus had a clear eye for the commonest things. His genius was only an enlarged common sense. He adverts with chaste severity to all natural facts. His sublimity is Greek sincerity and simpleness, naked wonder which mythology had not helped to explain... Whatever the common eye sees at all and expresses as best it may, he sees uncommonly and describes with rare completeness. The multitude that thronged the theatre could no doubt go along with him to the end... The social condition of genius is the same in all ages. Aeschylus was undoubtedly alone and without sympathy in his simple reverence for the mystery of the universe.
“A sweet disorder in the dress
Kindles in clothes a wantonness.”
"Delight in Disorder".
Hesperides (1648)
1950s, The Chance for Peace (1953)
Context: Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. … Is there no other way the world may live?
“The key to a successful restaurant is dressing girls in degrading clothes.”
Mr. Mike's America: A Comic's Trek with SNL's First Head Writer (1983)
“The flower has no weekday self, dressed as it always is in Sunday clothes.”
Sens-plastique
“The soul was not cured,
it was as full as a clothes closet
of dresses that did not fit.”
