Quotes about common
page 17

“What is a Poet?…He is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind; a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the Universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them.”

William Wordsworth book Lyrical Ballads

Preface.
Lyrical Ballads (1798–1800)

Life, Men, Soul, Nature

“The desire to serve the common good must without fail be a requisite of the soul, a necessity for personal happiness; if it issues not from there, but from theoretical or other considerations, it is not at all the same thing.”

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) Russian dramatist, author and physician

Note-Book of Anton Chekhov (1921)

Happiness, Soul, Personality

“Such a background might consist either of a racial tradition or a national experience. But in its lowest terms it must be characterized by a capacity for assimilation. While America is built on a broad faith in mankind, it likewise gains its strength by a recognition of a needed training for citizenship. The Pilgrims were not content merely to reach our shores in safety, that they might live according to a sort of daily opportunism. They were building on firmer ground than that. Sixteen years after they landed at Plymouth, they and their associates founded Harvard College. They institutionalized their faith in education; that was their offering for the common good.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Whose Country Is This? (1921)

Education, Faith, Training

“The sadistic person is as dependent on the submissive person as the latter is on the former; neither can live without the other. The difference is only that the sadistic person commands, exploits, hurts, humiliates, and that the masochistic person is commanded, exploited, hurt, humiliated. This is a considerable difference in a realistic sense; in a deeper emotional sense, the difference is not so great as that which they both have in common: fusion without integrity.”

Erich Fromm book The Art of Loving

Source: The Art of Loving (1956), Ch. 2

Sense, Hurt, Dependency, Personality

“There can have been few occasions in all our long political history when to the son of a man who counted for something in his day and generation has been vouchsafed the privilege of setting the seal on the work which the father began but had perforce to leave unfinished. Nearly 29 years have passed since Joseph Chamberlain entered upon his great campaign in favour of Imperial Preference and Tariff Reform. More than 17 years have gone by since he died, without having seen the fulfilment of his aims and yet convinced that, if not exactly in his way, yet in some modified form his vision would eventually take shape. His work was not in vain. Time and the misfortunes of the country have brought conviction to many who did not feel that they could agree with him then. I believe he would have found consolation for the bitterness of his disappointment if he could have foreseen that these proposals, which are the direct and legitimate descendants of his own conception, would be laid before the House of Commons, which he loved, in the presence of one and by the lips of the other of the two immediate successors to his name and blood.”

Neville Chamberlain (1869–1940) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1932/feb/04/import-duties in the House of Commons (4 February 1932) introducing the Import Duties Act 1932. Chancellor of the Exchequer

Love, Disappointment, Way, Feeling

“Looking around at the faces of his colleagues in the Senior Common Room he felt reassured: not a Lineament of Gratified Desire to be seen.”

David Lodge book Changing Places

Changing Places ([1975] 1978), ch. 1, p. 27.

“Learning is, in too many cases, but a foil to common sense; a substitute for true knowledge.”

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer

"On the Ignorance of the Learned" Table Talk: Essays On Men And Manners http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Essays/TableHazIV.htm (1821-1822)

Knowledge, Sense, Learning

“In practice, the writer or scholar who aspires to that public position which defines intellectuals and distinguishes them from mere scribblers has always had to choose between being the apologist for rulers or an advisor to the people; the tragedy of the twentieth century is that these two functions have ceased to exist independently of one another, and intellectuals like Sartre who thought they were fulfilling one role were inevitably drawn to play both. If their successors, in France or elsewhere, are truly to put this past behind them, it will not be enough to recognize past mistakes. It will also be necessary to accept that entailed in the very meaning for modern society of the term intellectual are a number of roles that writers and scholars today may no longer wish to fulfill; indeed, a refusal to occupy the post of the (engaged) intellectual may be the most positive of the steps modern thinkers can take in any serious effort to come to terms with their own responsibility for our common recent past.”

Tony Judt (1948–2010) British historian

Source: Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956 (1992), p. 319

People, Effort, Past

“When external and internal forces hostile to the development of socialism try to turn the development of a given socialist country in the direction of the restoration of the capitalist system, when a threat arises to the cause of socialism in that country … this is no longer merely a problem for that country's people, but a common problem, the concern of all socialist countries.”

Leonid Brezhnev (1906–1982) General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

Speech at the 5th Congress of the Polish United Workers Party (12 November 1968), quoted in The Rise and Fall of the Brezhnev Doctrine in Soviet Foreign Policy (2003) by Matthew J. Ouimet

Hostility, People, Problem, Country

“My heart beats more for a rougher, more ordinary, more vulgar art that does not live in a poetic, fairy-tale dream but admits the fearful, the common, the magnificent, the ordinary, the banal grotesque in life. An art that can always be directly present to us when life is at its most real.. [ on the same day he noted:].. Martin thinks there will be a war. Russia England France against Germany. We agreed that it would be no bad thing for our rather demoralized present-day civilization if everyone's instincts and drives were to be harnessed to one cause..”

Max Beckmann (1884–1950) German painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor and writer

Beckmann's Diary, 9 January, 1909, in Leben in Berlin: Tagebuch, 1908-1909, ed. Hans Kinkel; R. Piper & Co., Munich and Zurich, 1983, pp. 22-23; as quoted in 'Portfolios', Alexander Dückers; in German Expressionist Prints and Drawings - Essays Vol 1.; published by Museum Associates, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California & Prestel-Verlag, Germany, 1986, p. 99
1900s - 1920s

Life, War, Fear, Dreams

“The right hon. gentleman is like the Bourbons. He has learned nothing. He comes back to this new House of Commons with the same airy graces – the same subtle dialectics – and the same light and frivolous way of dealing with great questions. He little knows the temper of the new House of Commons if he thinks those methods will prevail here. The right hon. gentleman has…asked certain questions which he seemed to think were posers. …I have no direct answer to give to them. They are utterly futile, nonsensical and misleading. They are invented by the right hon. gentleman for the purpose of occupying time in this debate. I say, enough of this foolery.”

Henry Campbell-Bannerman (1836–1908) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

… Move your amendments and let us get to business.
Speech in the House of Commons answering Conservative leader Arthur Balfour (12 March 1906), quoted in John Wilson, C.B.: A Life of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman (London: Constable, 1973), p. 497
Prime Minister

Way, Question, Business, Thinking

“Organization is the arrangement of personnel for facilitating the accomplishment of some agreed purpose through the allocation of functions and responsibilities. It is the relating of efforts and capacities of individuals and groups engaged upon a common task in such a way as to secure the desired objective with the least friction and the most satisfaction to those for whom the task is done and those engaged in the enterprise.”

Marshall E. Dimock (1903–1991) American writer

John M. Gaus, Leonard Dupee White, and Marshall E. Dimock. "A theory of organization in public administration." The Frontiers of Public Administration (1936): 66.; Bold text cited in Philip Selznick (1948, 25)

Way, Effort

“For years your treasure has been in the Stock Exchange, or the House of Commons, or the Salon, or the reviews that "really count" (if they still exist), or the drawing-rooms of Mayfair; and thither your heart perpetually tends to stray. Habit has you in its chains. You are not free.”

Evelyn Underhill book Practical Mysticism

Source: Practical Mysticism (1914), Chapter V, Self Adjustment, p. 84

Heart, Drawing, Housing

“But three decades have evaporated in our lives, too quickly and without sufficient residual evidence of their importance. But much has changed since then. The hope that there would be expeditious resolutions to our myriad problems has long since evaporated with those years. Many who debated and hoped then, now do neither. There now seems to be a broad acceptance of the racial divide as a permanent state. While we once celebrated those things that we had in common with our fellow citizens who did not share our race, so many now are triumphal about our differences, finding little, if anything, in common. Indeed, some go so far as to all but define each of us by our race and establish the range of our thinking and our opinions, if not our deeds by our color.”

Clarence Thomas (1948) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

1990s, I Am a Man, a Black Man, an American (1998)

Hope, Color, Problem, Thinking

“The Alabama Democratic convention [instructed] its delegates to walk out of the national convention if the party refused to adopt a platform pledging a federal slave code for the territories. Other lower-South Democratic organizations followed suit. In February, Jefferson Davis presented the substance of southern demands to the Senate in resolutions affirming that neither Congress nor a territorial legislature could impair the constitutional right of any citizen of the United States to take his slave property into the common territories.”

James M. McPherson (1936) American historian

James M. McPherson. Battle Cry of Freedom http://historynewsnetwork.org/blog/153655 (1988) p. 214 1980s

“What you do is as important as anything government does. I ask you to seek a common good beyond your comfort; to defend needed reforms against easy attacks; to serve your nation, beginning with your neighbor. I ask you to be citizens: citizens, not spectators; citizens, not subjects; responsible citizens, building communities of service and a nation of character.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2000s, 2001, First inaugural address (January 2001)

Communication

“If you’re very very rich, you can buy your Senate seat by spending as much of your money as you want. Meanwhile, your poor plebian opponent is running around groveling for the small contributions allowed by law. Hence the Corzines and the Kohls, who parachute into Congress seemingly out of nowhere. Having given this leg up to the rich, we should resist packing our legislatures with yet more privileged parachutists, the well-born. True, the Brits did it that way for centuries, but with characteristic honesty. They established a house of Parliament exclusively for high-born twits and ensconced them there for life. There they chatter away in supreme irrelevance deep into their dotage. Problem is that the U. S. Senate retains House of Commons powers even as it develops a House of Lords membership.”

Charles Krauthammer (1950–2018) American journalist

Column, December 19, 2008, "The U.S. House of Lords?" http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/krauthammer121908.php3 at jewishworldreview.com. 2000s, 2008

Life, Money, Law, Way

“People don't like reality, they don't like common sense, until age forces it on them.”

Graham Greene book The Ministry of Fear

The Ministry of Fear (1943)

People, Age, Reality, Sense

“For some time I debated over whether I should start these memoirs at the beginning or at the end, that is, whether I should put my birth or my death in first place. Since common usage would call for beginning with birth, two considerations led me to adopt a different method: the first is that I am not exactly a writer who is dead but a dead man who is a writer, for whom the grave was a second cradle; the second is that the writing would be more distinctive and novel in that way. Moses, who also wrote about his death, didn't place it at the opening but at the close: a radical difference between this book and the Pentateuch.”

Machado de Assis (1839–1908) Brazilian writer

Algum tempo hesitei se devia abrir estas memórias pelo princípio ou pelo fim, isto é, se poria em primeiro lugar o meu nascimento ou a minha morte. Suposto o uso vulgar seja começar pelo nascimento, duas considerações me levaram a adotar diferente método: a primeira é que eu não sou propriamente um autor defunto mas um defunto autor, para quem a campa foi outro berço; a segunda é que o escrito ficaria assim mais galante e mais novo. Moisés, que também contou a sua morte, não a pôs no intróito, mas no cabo: diferença radical entre este livro e o Pentateuco.
Source: As Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas (1881), Ch. 1 (opening words), p. 7.

Death, Books, Way, Birth

“You must handle [the House of Lords] a little more firmly, and the time has come for unflinching and resolute action. For my part, I would not remain a member of a Liberal Cabinet one hour unless I knew that the Cabinet had determined not to hold office after the next General Election unless full powers are accorded to it which would enable it to place on the Statute Book of the realm a measure which will ensure that the House of Commons in future can carry, not merely Tory Bills, as it does now, but Liberal and progressive measures in the course of a single Parliament either with or without the sanction of the House of Lords.”

David Lloyd George (1863–1945) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech to the National Liberal Club (3 December 1909), quoted in Better Times: Speeches by the Right Hon. D. Lloyd George, M.P., Chancellor of the Exchequer (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1910), pp. 179-180.
Chancellor of the Exchequer

Books, Time, Future, Parting

“Justice Antonin Scalia fundamentally changed the way the Supreme Court interpreted both statutes and the Constitution. In both contexts, his focus on text and its original public meaning often translated into more limited criminal prohibitions and broader constitutional protections for defendants. ‎As to statutes, Justice Scalia refocused the court’s attention on the text of the laws Congress enacted. Although he may not have succeeded in getting the court to forswear even looking at legislative history, he did persuade his colleagues to start — and very often end — the analysis with the text. In the criminal context, he limited terms like extortion and property to their common law core and found the residual clause of the Armed Career Criminal Act as unconstitutionally vague as “the phrase ‘fire-engine red, light pink, maroon, navy blue, or colors that otherwise involve shades of red.” When it came to interpreting the Constitution, he likewise put the text first and emphasized that the terms must be understood in light of their original public meaning. He believed that the words should be understood the way the framers used them. This did not mean that constitutional protections were frozen in time.”

Paul Clement (lawyer)

In Scalia, criminal defendants have lost a great defender: Paul Clement https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2016/02/19/scalia-funeral-constitution-defendants-jury-paul-clement-column/80575460/ (February 19, 2016)

Justice, Law, Color, Way

“He's put a lock on the door of the House of Commons and he refuses to face the people of Canada through their elected representatives”

Jack Layton (1950–2011) Leader of the New Democratic Party of Canada

On Stephen Harper, after the Governor General announced Parliament was prorogued, Dec. 4, 2008[citation needed]

People, Housing

““People always talk about human sacrifice as if it were an unusual and aberrant activity,” she said thoughtfully. “Over the centuries, it’s really been fairly common in a number of societies. Think about it. There’re a number of religions in the United States whose worship centers on a particular human sacrifice.” She glanced at me.
“Jesus Christ on the cross,” I said slowly.
“Certainly. Thousands of people consume Christ’s body and blood each Sunday.”
“That’s different.”
She shrugged. “Not really. Christ died long ago in a faraway place, and that might make it seem different. His worshipers claimed he was God incarnate, but the Aztecs claimed the same for the god-king they sacrificed. It happened only once, and that speaks for moderation on the part of the Christians, but that’s not a fundamental difference, just one of degree.””

Pat Murphy book The Falling Woman

Source: The Falling Woman (1986), Chapter 10 (p. 131)

God, People, Religion, Thinking

“As also the great number of Corporations; which are as it were many lesser Common-wealths in the bowels of a greater, like wormes in the entrayles of a natural man.”

Thomas Hobbes book Leviathan

The Second Part, Chapter 29, p. 174
Leviathan (1651)

Nature, Wealth

“[ Public administration is merely] a special case of the larger category, administration, a process which is common to all organized human effort and which is highly developed in modern corporate business, in the church, in the Red Cross, in education, and in international bodies, public and private.”

Leonard D. White (1891–1958) American historian

Source: Introduction to the Study of Public Administration, 1926, p. 3-4 (1939 edition); as cited in: Albert Lepawsky (1949), Administration, p. 8

Education, Business, Effort

“According to a variety of very authoritative sources, Henry A. Kissinger is not a Jew, but a faggot. I will not tolerate any denial of civil rights to a person who happens to be homosexual. Ordinarily, a homosexual is like an ordinary person suffering the affliction of nasty boils; one recognizes the distinction between the person and the affliction.… Henry A. Kissinger is no ordinary, common, garden-variety of homosexual. His heathen sexual inclinations are merely an integral part of a larger evil.… Think of Nero, and then of Kissinger, and then of Nero, and then of Roy M. Cohn. That is the kind of faggot Henry Kissinger is.”

Lyndon LaRouche (1922–2019) American political activist and founder of the LaRouche movement

"Kissinger, the Politics of Faggotry" (3 August 1982)

Thinking, Affliction, Suffering, Evil

“This women's movement is a great movement of the sexes toward each other, with common ideals as to government, as well as common ideals in domestic life, where fully developed manhood must seek and find its real mate in the mother of his children, as well as the solace of his home.”

Rebecca Latimer Felton (1835–1930) American politician

'Why I Am a Suffragist? Cornerstones of Georgia History, p. 169 http://books.google.com/books?id=0qdkKS2F42MC&pg=PA165&lpg=PA165&dq=rebecca+latimer+felton+why+i+am+a+suffragist&source=bl&ots=B1fM_lWjgv&sig=bOmSGdPp921qKNy3TlmDU3uWaEc#PPA169,M1.

Life, Women, Children, Sex

“Music is a solace for me now. As I age, contrary to common sense, I am more and more drawn into it and apt to spend more of my waking and some of my sleeping hours thinking about it, or just feeling about it. It is my escape.”

Mark Heard (1951–1992) American musician and record producer

Life in the Industry: A Musician's Diary

Age, Music, Feeling, Thinking

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Speech at Newton, Montgomeryshire (4 March 1972), from The Common Market: Renegotiate or Come Out (Elliot Right Way Books, 1973), pp. 57-8
1970s

Life, Death, People, World

“It excites world wonder in the Parliamentary countries that we should build a Chamber, starting afresh, which can only seat two-thirds of its Members. It is difficult to explain this to those who do not know our ways. They cannot easily be made to understand why we consider that the intensity, passion, intimacy, informality and spontaneity of our Debates constitute the personality of the House of Commons and endow it at once with its focus and its strength.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech in the House of Commons, October 24, 1950 "Motion for Address in Reply" http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1950/oct/24/motion-for-address-in-reply#column_2707. Post-war years (1945–1955)

World, Way, Understanding, Passion

“Today, in the era of the complete triumph of the spectacle, what can be reaped from the heritage of Debord? It is clear that the spectacle is language, the very communicativity or linguistic being of humans. This means that a fuller Marxian analysis should deal with the fact that capitalism (or any other name one wants to give the process that today dominated world history) was directed not only toward the expropriation of productive activity, but also and principally toward the alienation of language itself, of the very linguistic and communicative nature of humans, of that logos which one of Heraclitus' fragments identified as the Common. The extreme form of this expropriation of the Common is the spectacle, that is, the politics we live in. But this also means that in the spectacle of our own linguistic nature comes back to us inverted. This is why (precisely because what is being expropriated is the very possibility of common good) the violence of the spectacle is so destructive; but for the same reason the spectacle remains something like a positive possibility that can be used against it.”

Giorgio Agamben (1942) Italian philosopher

Source: The Coming Community (1993), Ch. 18 : Shekinah

World, History, Communication, Nature

“Our mental environment is a common-property resource like the air or the water. We need to protect ourselves from unwanted incursions into it, much the same way we lobbied for nonsmoking areas ten years ago.”

Kalle Lasn (1942) Estonian-Canadian film maker, author, magazine editor and activist

Cultural Jam (2000)

Way, Water

“If you if you take Buddhism and Christianity and so forth there's a kind of battle — a subtle sort of struggle taking place because they're not standing in a common ground but … take the Earth or ecology then suddenly they can begin to explore what they have to offer. So I do think I do think absolutely that … there will be a flourishing of religions, not a withering away. And they will flourish to the degree that they will move into the context of planet and universe. I even think that as a matter of fact that … some of the central insights of the religions are more powerfully presented by what we know about the universe now then when they were first formulated.”

Brian Swimme (1950) American cosmologist

MeaningofLife.tv interview, 2007

Religion, Thinking, Universe

“Reason is the life of the law; nay, the common law itself is nothing else but reason… The law, which is perfection of reason.”

Edward Coke (1552–1634) English lawyer and judge

The First Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England, or, A Commentary on Littleton (London, 1628, ed. F. Hargrave and C. Butler, 19th ed., London, 1832), Third Institute. Compare: "Let us consider the reason of the case. For nothing is law that is not reason", Sir John Powell, Coggs vs. Bernard, 2 Ld. Raym. Rep. p. 911.
Institutes of the Laws of England

Life, Law, Perfection

“It is a melancholy truth; yet such is the blessed effect of civilization! the most respectable women are the most oppressed; and, unless they have understandings far superiour to the common run of understandings, taking in both sexes, they must, from being treated like contemptible beings, become contemptible.”

Mary Wollstonecraft book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Source: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Ch. 9

Women, Truth, Sex, Understanding

“Do not imagine that mathematics is hard and crabbed, and repulsive to common sense. It is merely the etherealization of common sense.”

William Thomson (1824–1907) British physicist and engineer

Quoted in Life of Lord Kelvin (1910) by Silvanus Phillips Thompson

Imagination, Mathematics, Sense

“All truth, in the long run, is only common sense clarified.”

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) English biologist and comparative anatomist

"On the Study of Biology" (1876) http://books.google.com/books?id=4cl5c4T9LWkC&pg=PA163&lpg=PA163&dq=All+truth,+in+the+long+run,+is+only+common+sense+clarified.+huxley+On+the+Study+of+Biology&source=bl&ots=87sGwjauQT&sig=pEmWoYQoN8HUVIVU6WSrnAAM8Dc&hl=en&ei=hFcnStrlM5H0tQPG-NBH&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2 1870s

Truth, Sense

“The remarkable similarity of metabolic pathways and gene sequences across the phyla argues strongly that all modern organisms are derived from a common evolutionary progenitor by a series of small changes (mutations), each of which conferred a selective advantage to some organism in some ecological niche.”

Albert L. Lehninger (1917–1986) American biochemist

Principles of Biochemistry, Ch. 1 : The Foundations of Biochemistry

Change

“Until recently, ecologists were content to describe how nature “looks” (sometimes by means of fantastic terms!) and to speculate on what she might have looked like in the past or may look like in the future. Now, an equal emphasis is being placed on what nature ‘does’, and rightly so, because the changing face of nature can never be understood unless her metabolism is also studied. This change in approach brings the small organisms into perspective with the large, and encourages the use of experimental methods to supplement the analytic. It is evident that so long as a purely descriptive viewpoint is maintained, there is very little in common between such structurally diverse organisms as sperma-tophytes, vertebrates and bacteria. In real life, however, all these are intimately linked functionally in ecological systems, according to well-defined laws. Thus the only kind of general ecology is that which I call a ‘functional ecology’, and this kind is of the greatest interest to all students of the subject, regardless of present or future specialisations.”

Eugene P. Odum (1913–2002) mathematician, ecologist, natural philosopher, and systems ecologist

Eugene Odum (1957) Fundamentals of Ecology. p. ix, cited in: Edward Goldsmith (1970-73/2013) Towards a Unified Science http://www.edwardgoldsmith.org/598/

Life, Law, Nature, Study

“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

Law, Sense

“In the old romanticism the poem was an uncommon effect of common experience on the poet. All interest in the poem centred in this mysterious capacity of the poet for overfeeling, for being overaffected. In Poe the old romanticism ended and the new romanticism began. That is, the interest was broadened to include the reader: the end of the poem was pushed ahead a stage, from the poet to the reader. The uncommon effect of experience on the poet became merely incidental to the uncommon effect which he might have on the reader. Mystery was replaced by science; inspiration by psychology.”

Laura Riding Jackson (1901–1991) poet, critic, novelist, essayist and short story writer

"What is a Poem?" from Anarchism Is Not Enough (London: Jonathan Cape, 1928)

Science

“The thing about most of the media is that they want to reduce everybody to the lowest common denominator. They don't want people to have any heroes. I've got nothing against criticism of political figures, but that's different from a personal attack. It's easier to do sensationalism and character assassination than focus on the real issues. And they're obsessed, it seems, with portraying the ugliest side of humanity—the dishonesty, hypocrisy, ego battles, and fights.
How dare Fox, CNN, and MSNBC call themselves news stations? They're entertainment stations.”

Jesse Ventura (1951) American politician and former professional wrestler

Source: Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! (2008), Ch. 3 (p. 51)

People, Fight, Personality

“The common idea that success spoils people by making them vain, egotistic and self-complacent is erroneous; on the contrary it makes them, for the most part, humble, tolerant and kind. Failure makes people bitter and cruel.”

W. Somerset Maugham book The Summing Up

Source: The Summing Up (1938), p. 182

People, Idea, Failure, Success

“What's the point of having metamodels, and why should you care? Because models must be stated in a way that yields a common understanding among all involved parties, we need a way to specify exactly what a model means. Metamodels allow you to do just that: They specify the concepts of the language you're using to specify a model.”

Stephen J. Mellor (1952) British computer scientist

Source: MDA Distilled. Principles of Model-Driven Architecture, 2003, p. 37.

Way, Understanding

“"Leaves, some the wind scatters on the ground—So is the race of man." Leaves, also, are thy children; and leaves, too, are they who cry out so if they are worthy of credit, or bestow their praise, or on the contrary curse, or secretly blame and sneer; and leaves, in like manner, are those who shall receive and transmit a man's fame to after-times. For all such things as these "are produced in the season of spring," as the poet says; then the wind casts them down; then the forest produces other leaves in their places. But a brief existence is common to all things, and yet thou avoidest and pursuest all things as if they would be eternal.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

X, 34
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book X

Children, Spring, Time, Cry

“The common people (live in) poverty so great and miserable that the life of the people can be depicted or accurately described only as the home of stark want and dwelling place of bitter woe.”

Jahangir (1569–1627) 4th Mughal Emperor

Reference is to a remark of Francisco Pelsaert, who visited the Mughal court in India in the time of Jahangir. Quoted in The position of Hindus under the Delhi Sultanate, 1206-1526 by Kanhaiya Lall Srivastava, quoted from Elst, Koenraad (2014). Decolonizing the Hindu mind: Ideological development of Hindu revivalism. New Delhi: Rupa. p. 390

Life, People, Home

“It is no part of my job as Chancellor of the Exchequer to put before the House of Commons proposals for the expenditure of public money. The function of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, as I understand it, is to resist all demands for expenditure made by his colleagues and, when he can no longer resist, to limit the concession to the barest point of acceptance.”

Philip Snowden, 1st Viscount Snowden (1864–1937) British politician

To the House of Commons (30 July 1924, H.C. Deb. Vol. 176, Cols 2091-2)

Money, Understanding, Parting, Housing

“Barack believes in the greatness of America. He’s seen it in his own life’s journey. But he also knows that what’s holding us back is that our leaders have lost touch with the ideals that make this country great. Ideals like equality. Justice. Freedom from want and despair. And he believes that until we restore a sense of common destiny and shared purpose; until we understand that we are only as strong as the weakest among us; that there is more that binds us together than drives us apart; until we see ourselves in one another – until we truly care for all children; not just our own then we will continue to struggle with the problems that plague us.”

Michelle Obama (1964) lawyer, writer, wife of Barack Obama and former First Lady of the United States

2000s, A Challenge to Overcome (November 2007)

Life, Children, Justice, Understanding

“This Party needs to protect itself against the activities of small groups of inflexible political persuasion, extreme so-called left and in a few cases extreme so-called moderates, having in common only their arrogant dogmatism. These groups, equally the multichromatic coalitionist fringe or groups specifically formed to fight other marauding groups, these groups are not what this Party is about. Infestation of this kind thrives only, and can thrive only, in minuscule local parties.”

Harold Wilson (1916–1995) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech to Labour Party conference (30 September 1975), quoted in Labour Party Annual Conference Report 1975, pp. 186-187.
Prime Minister

Fight

“Leadership is the capacity and will to rally men and women to a common purpose and the character which inspires confidence.”

Bernard Montgomery, 1st Viscount Montgomery of Alamein (1887–1976) British Army officer, Commander of Allied forces at the Battle of El Alamein

As quoted in Hearts Touched With Fire: My 500 Favorite Inspirational Quotations (2004) by Elizabeth Hanford Dole, p. 143

Women, Men, Confidence, Leadership

“While in improvisation there is a sense of craft within one's own instrument and in being able to interact with other musicians, in noise this disappears to the extent of anti-virtuosity becoming a virtue. A nihilist approach to improvisation in which the interaction is not based upon developing common denominators for some communication to happen among the players, but rather a matter of developing the freedom of individual expression.”

Mattin (1977) Spanish musician

Page 173.
"Anti-Copyright: Why Improvisation and Noise Run Against the Idea of Intellectual Property" (October 2008)

Communication, Sense, Freedom

“As there were black swans, though civilized people had existed for three thousand years on the earth without meeting with them…The uniform experience, therefore, of the inhabitants of the known world, agreeing in a common result, without one known instance of deviation from that result, is not always sufficient to establish a general conclusion.”

John Stuart Mill book A System of Logic

A System of Logic (1843)

People, World

“The question of common sense is always "What is it good for?"—a question which would abolish the rose and be answered triumphantly by the cabbage.”

James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) American poet, critic, editor, and diplomat

"Chaucer," http://books.google.com/books?id=LOdNAAAAcAAJ&q=%22The+question+of+common+sense+is+always+what+is+it+good+for+a+question+which+would+abolish+the+rose+and+be+answered+triumphantly+by+the+cabbage%22&pg=PA185#v=onepage North American Review (July 1870) http://books.google.com/books?id=sAVaov3zePMC&q=%22The+question+of+common+sense+is+always+what+is+it+good+for+a+question+which+would+abolish+the+rose+and+be+answered+triumphantly+by+the+cabbage%22&pg=PA173#v=onepage My Study Windows (1871)

Question, Sense

“The liberty of the individual to do as he pleases, even in innocent matters, is not absolute. It must frequently yield to the common good.”

George Sutherland (1862–1942) Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, United States Senator, member of the United States House of Re…

Adkins v. Children's Hospital, 261 U.S. 560 (1923)

“Missouri’s term limits, for example, serve as a restriction, yet Missourians overwhelmingly support them, and they are in effect for members of the Legislature. Noncompete clauses and nepotism laws restrict employment, but they are used to stop unethical behavior. Stopping legislators from immediately becoming lobbyists following their terms is not only common sense, it mirrors similar laws and practices frequently followed in the private sector. I believe this world is made up of imperfect people. Our political process is certainly no different. I also recognize that no law, rule or regulation will fix every problem, but they can certainly help.”

Jay Ashcroft (1973)

Get serious about meaningful ethics reform http://www.stltoday.com/opinion/columnists/get-serious-about-meaningful-ethics-reform/article_d9a98fc0-9172-54af-a084-335bc70fa3ed.html (March 10, 2016)

People, World, Law, Behavior

“It would be tedious to dwell upon every striking mark of national decline: some, however, will press themselves forward to particular notice; and amongst them are: that Italian-like effeminacy, which has, at last, descended to the yeomanry of the country, who are now found turning up their silly eyes in ecstacy at a music-meeting, while they should be cheering the hounds, or measuring their strength at the ring; the discouragement of all the athletic sports and modes of strife amongst the common people, and the consequent and fearful increase of those cuttings and stabbings, those assassin-like ways of taking vengeance, formerly heard of in England only as the vices of the most base and cowardly foreigners, but now become so frequent amongst ourselves as to render necessary a law to punish such practices with death; the prevalence and encouragement of a hypocritical religion, a canting morality, and an affected humanity; the daily increasing poverty of the national church, and the daily increasing disposition still to fleece the more than half-shorne clergy, who are compelled to be, in various ways, the mere dependants of the upstarts of trade; the almost entire extinction of the ancient country gentry, whose estates are swallowed up by loan-jobbers, contractors, and nabobs, who, for the far greater part not Englishmen themselves, exercise in England that sort of insolent sway, which, by the means of taxes raised from English labour, they have been enabled to exercise over the slaves of India or elsewhere; the bestowing of honours upon the mere possessors of wealth, without any regard to birth, character, or talents, or to the manner in which that wealth has been acquired; the familiar intercourse of but too many of the ancient nobility with persons of low birth and servile occupations, with exchange and insurance-brokers, loan and lottery contractors, agents and usurers, in short, with all the Jew-like race of money-changers.”

William Cobbett (1763–1835) English pamphleteer, farmer and journalist

Political Register (27 October 1804).

Death, Money, People, Fear

“Having served for nearly half a century in the House of Commons, I now want more time to devote to politics and more freedom to do so.”

Tony Benn (1925–2014) British Labour Party politician

Paul Waugh, "Benn retires to spend more time with his politics", The Independent, 28 June 1999, p. 5.
1990s

Freedom, Time, Housing

“You can help me to keep my head cool," was the answer. "You stand for the world of common sense which will always win in the long run. When I'm inclined to run amok you'll remind me of England. You'll lower the temperature.”

John Buchan book The House of the Four Winds

Source: The House of the Four Winds (1935), Ch. IV

World, Sense, Help

“The city and the crowd unidealise love; and love, in the young warm heart of a girl, should be a dream apart from all commoner emotions — as sweet and as ethereal as the blush with which it is born and dies. Beauty gives its own gracefulness to love — there must be romance blended with the passion inspired by the very lovely face which the mirror reflected.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Other Gift Books

Love, Beauty, Dreams, Girl

“All of us, I am certain, are united by more important things than those which superficially divide us. We are united, for instance, by a common detestation of colonialism in whatever form it appears. We are united by a common detestation of racialism. And we are united by a common determination to preserve and stabilise peace in the world....”

Sukarno (1901–1970) first President of the Republic of Indonesia

Speech at the Opening of the Bandung Conference

World, Peace, Appearance

“Behold you, then, my dear friend, at the head of a great army, establishing the liberties of your country against a foreign enemy. May heaven favor your cause, and make you the channel through which it may pour its favors. While you are exterminating the monster aristocracy, and pulling out the teeth and fangs of its associate, monarchy, a contrary tendency is discovered in some here. A sect has shown itself among us, who declare they espoused our new Constitution, not as a good and sufficient thing in itself, but only as a step to an English constitution, the only thing good and sufficient in itself, in their eye. It is happy for us that these are preachers without followers, and that our people are firm and constant in their republican purity. You will wonder to be told that it is from the eastward chiefly that these champions for a king, lords and commons come. They get some important associates from New York, and are puffed up by a tribe of agitators which have been hatched in a bed of corruption made up after the model of their beloved England. Too many of these stock-jobbers and king-jobbers have come into our legislature, or rather too many of our legislature have become stock-jobbers and king-jobbers. However, the voice of the people is beginning to make itself heard, and will probably cleanse their seats at the ensuing election.”

James Madison (1751–1836) 4th president of the United States (1809 to 1817)

Letter to Gilbert du Motier, marquis de Lafayette (16 June 1792)
1790s

Happiness, People, Country

“We were at the age when a friend's conversation seems like oneself talking, when one shares a life in common the way I still think, bachelor though I am, some married couples are able to live.”

Cesare Pavese (1908–1950) Italian poet, novelist, literary critic, and translator

Source: The Beach (1941), Chapter 2, p. 8

Life, Age, Way, Thinking

“And shall they rise, all these? Will there be a trumpet blast so shrill that none of them may refuse to hear it, and the soul, re-entering its shrine of eminent or common clay, pass upward to the judgment? "Many and mighty, but all hushed," shall they submit with us to the judgment of the last assize? And in that world is it true that gold is not the currency, and that rank is not hereditary, and that there is only one name that is honored? Then, if this is the end of all men, let the living lay it to heart. Solemn and thoughtful, let us search for an assured refuge; childlike and earnest, let us conf1de in the one accepted Name; let us realize the tender and infinite nearness of God our Father, through Jesus our Surety and our Friend.”

William Morley Punshon (1824–1881) English Nonconformist minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 519.

Men, God, World, Soul

“In short, greatly as I admire all that has been said here to-night, gladly and gratefully as I recognise the genuinely philosophic temper and the authentic philosophic place it all most certainly has, I am still moved to say that my honoured colleagues, in this their common underlying conception, have to my mind all "missed the mark and come short of the glory of God." They have not seized nor expressed the complete Ideal of the Reason.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The City of God and the True God as its Head (In Royce’s “The Conception of God: a Philosophical Discussion Concerning the Nature of the Divine Idea as a Demonstrable Reality”), p.89

God, Night

“We are still living under the reign of logic: this, of course, is what I have been driving at. But in this day and age logical methods are applicable only to solving problems of secondary interest. The absolute rationalism that is still in vogue allows us to consider only facts relating directly to our experience. Logical ends, on the contrary, escape us. It is pointless to add that experience itself has found itself increasingly circumscribed. It paces back and forth in a cage from which it is more and more difficult to make it emerge. It too leans for support on what is most immediately expedient, and it is protected by the sentinels of common sense.”

André Breton (1896–1966) French writer

Le Manifeste du Surréalisme, Andre Breton (Manifesto of Surrealism; 1924)

Age, Support, Problem, Sense

“"How do you make your prayer-meetings interesting?" The whole subject is mixed up. "Interesting" to whom? The Lord? The suppliants? The spectators? The only way is to teach men to pray; to eliminate those who preach or rhapsodize or scold or "lament" interminably, to promote general fervor among the people, and apply to the meeting the ordinary principles of common sense.”

John Hall (1829–1898) Presbyterian pastor from Northern Ireland in New York, died 1898

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 475.

Men, People, Way, Sense

“Students, young people, have the right to join together in order to guide their efforts towards a common goal, and they will use this right. As for their goal, it is simple: for them it is a matter of ensuring that the July revolution is not a lie; every edifice built by the Empire and the Restoration must be overthrown, and since not one single stone of this edifice is yet to fall, they will work indefatigably to demolish and destroy it. We call for the destruction of the university. We call for the destruction of the country’s most odious and harmful monopoly, of that which stifles civilization at its source and which is the cruellest insult inflicted on human intelligence.”

Louis Auguste Blanqui (1805–1881) French socialist and political activist

"Declaration of the Provisional Committee for Schools" (1831)

People, Lie, Intelligence, Effort

“The personality market, the most decisive effect and symptom of the great salesroom, underlies the all pervasive distrust and self-alienation so characteristic of metropolitan people. Without common values and mutual trust, the cash nexus that links one man to another in transient contact has been made subtle in a dozen ways, and made to bite deeper into all areas of life and relations. People are required by the salesman ethic and convention to pretend interest in others in order to manipulate them. In the course of time, and as this ethic spreads, it is got on to. Still, it is conformed to as part of one; s job and one's style of life, but now with a winking eye, for one knows that manipulation is inherent in every human contact. Men are estranged from one another as each secretly tries to make an instrument of the other, and in time a full circle is made: one makes an instrument of himself and is estranged from it also.”

C. Wright Mills book White Collar: The American Middle Classes

White Collar: The American Middle Classes (1951)

Life, Men, People, Way

“Christianity neither is, nor ever was, a part of the common law [this quote is referring to English Common Law].”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Vol. 1 Whether Christianity is Part of the Common Law (1764) Broken link http://oll.libertyfund.org/Texts/Jefferson0136/Works/0054-01_Bk.pdf. Published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes http://oll.libertyfund.org/ToC/0054.php, Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford, ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, p. 459 1760s

Law, Quotes, Parting

“Oatmeal indeed supplies the common people of Scotland with the greatest and best part of their food, which is in general much inferior to that of their neighbours of the same rank in England.”

Adam Smith (1723–1790) Scottish moral philosopher and political economist

Source: (1776), Book I, Chapter VIII, p. 91 (Oatmeal in England makes for great horses, in Scotland Great Men).

People, Food, Parting

“The pattern of sex differences found in our species mirrors that found in most mammals and in many other animals. As such, considerations of parsimony suggest that the best explanation for the human differences will invoke evolutionary forces common to many species, rather than social forces unique to our own. When we find the standard pattern of differences in other, less culture-bound creatures, we inevitably explain this in evolutionary terms. It seems highly dubious, when we find exactly the same pattern in human beings, to say that, in the case of this one primate species, we must explain it in terms of an entirely different set of causes — learning or cumulative culture — which coincidentally replicates the pattern found throughout the rest of the animal kingdom. Anyone who wishes to adopt this position has a formidable task in front of them. They must explain why, in the hominin lineage uniquely, the standard evolved psychological differences suddenly became maladaptive, and thus why natural selection “wiped the slate clean” of any biological contribution to these differences. They must explain why natural selection eliminated the psychological differences but left the correlated physical differences intact. And they must explain why natural selection would eliminate the psychological differences and leave it all to learning, when learning simply replicated the same sex differences anyway. How could natural selection favor extreme flexibility with respect to sex differences if that flexibility was never exercised and was therefore invisible to selection?”

Steve Stewart-Williams (1971)

Source: The Ape that Thought It Was a Peacock: Does Evolutionary Psychology Exaggerate Human Sex Differences? (2013), pp. 142-143

Sex, Exercises, Nature, Learning

“In science men have learned consciously to subordinate themselves to a common purpose without losing the individuality of their achievements. Each one knows that his work depends on that of his predecessors and colleagues, and that it can only reach its fruition through the work of his successors. In science men collaborate not because they are forced to by superior authority or because they blindly follow some chosen leader, but because they realize that only in this willing collaboration can each man find his goal.”

John Desmond Bernal (1901–1971) British scientist

Source: The Social Function of Science (1939), p. 415-416. Chapter XVI. THE SOCIAL FUNCTION OF SCIENCE. The Transformation of Science

Men, Learning, Science, Dependency

“Dogs and cats came from a common ancestor, can you explain that?… Can you explain it now, what animal you're talking about that dogs and cats came from… It was arboreal?… What do you mean by 'arboreal?”

Ray Comfort (1949) New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist

AronRa vs Ray Comfort (September 17th, 2012), Radio Paul's Radio Rants

Dogs, Cats, Animals

“Sometimes we can get too emotional as a club with things that are happening but we are both of a common denominator; we don't want the club to be in anyone else's hands. That is the way that the club stands with that. I support that.”

Alex Ferguson (1941) Scottish footballer and manager

Daily Telegraph (21 November 2004) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/2391739/Fergie-warns-off-Glazer.html.

Way, Support

“At a time when sentiments are so much divided, every man I trust, will give his vote with the recollection and the consciousness that it may depend upon his single vote whether the miseries, the crimes, the atrocities that I fear are now proceeding in China are to be discountenanced or not. We have now come to the crisis of the case. England is not yet committed. But if an adverse vote be given…England will have been committed. With you then, with us, with every one of us, it rests to show that this House, which is the first, the most ancient, and the noblest temple of freedom in the world, is also the temple of that everlasting justice without which freedom itself would be only a name or only a curse to mankind. And I cherish the trust and belief that when you, Sir, rise in your place to-night to declare the numbers of the division from the chair which you adorn, the words which you speak will go forth from the walls of the House of Commons, not only as a message of mercy and peace, but also as a message of British justice and British wisdom, to the farthest corners of the world.”

William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) British Liberal politician and prime minister of the United Kingdom

Speech https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1857/mar/03/resolution-moved-resumed-debate-fourth in the House of Commons (3 March 1857) against the Second Opium War. 1850s

Wisdom, World, Fear, Peace

“Names, once they are in common use, quickly become mere sounds, their etymology being buried, like so many of the earth's marvels, beneath the dust of habit.”

Salman Rushdie book The Satanic Verses

The Satanic Verses (1988)

“As with other modern artists, his readings provided not an organized outlook but a kind of metaphysical hum that surrounded his mental operations. His thinking was truly systematic only when it dealt with achieving the reality of the art object as a "creation out of nothing," which was a common theme in New York art after the last war and the break with the European past.”

Harold Rosenberg (1906–1978) American writer and art critic

Source: Art on the Edge, (1975), p. 58, "Newman: Meaning in Abstract Art II" : On Barnett Newman

War, Art, Thinking, Reality

“The skein of human continuity must often become this tenuous across the centuries (hanging by a thread, in the old cliché), but the circle remains unbroken if I can touch the ink of Lavoisier's own name, written by his own hand. A candle of light, nurtured by the oxygen of his greatest discovery, never burns out if we cherish the intellectual heritage of such unfractured filiation across the ages. We may also wish to contemplate the genuine physical thread of nucleic acid that ties each of us to the common bacterial ancestor of all living creatures, born on Lavoisier's ancienne terre more than 3.5 billion years ago—and never since disrupted, not for one moment, not for one generation. Such a legacy must be worth preserving from all the guillotines of our folly.”

Stephen Jay Gould book The Lying Stones of Marrakech

"The Proof of Lavoisier's Plates", p. 114
The Lying Stones of Marrakech (2001)

Age, Light

“The sale of assets is common with individuals and states when they run into financial difficulties. First, all the Georgian silver goes, and then all that nice furniture that used to be in the saloon. Then the Canalettos go.”

Harold Macmillan (1894–1986) British politician

"Stockton attacks Thatcher policies", The Times, 9 November 1985, p. 1.
Speech to the Tory Reform Group, 8 November 1985. Often quoted as "selling off the family silver".
1980s

“Here comes old Rosie she's looking mighty fine
Here comes hot Nancy she's steppin' right on time
There go the street lights bringin on the night
Here come the men faces hidden from the light
All through the shadows they come and they go
With only one thing in common
They got the fire down below.”

Bob Seger (1945) American singer-songwriter

The Fire Down Below.
Song lyrics, Night Moves (1976)

Men, Light, Time, Night

“Intertribal aggression, escalating in some cultures to limited warfare, is common enough to be regarded as a general characteristic of hunter-gatherer social behavior.”

Edward O. Wilson book On Human Nature

On Human Nature (1978), Ch.4 Emergence

Behavior

“A second part of criticisms [of our concept, Multitude], which relate closely to the first, focus on the economic conception of the multitude. … "You are really against the workers!" … Industrial labor has been displaced from its hegemonic position over other forms of labor by immaterial labor, which now tends to transform all sectors of production and society itself in line with its qualities. Industrial workers remain important, then, but within the context of this new paradigm. Here arises, then, but within the second criticism of this pair, that our argument of hegemony of immaterial labor replaces the old vanguard of industrial workers with a new vanguard of immaterial workers - Microsoft programmers leading us on the shining path. "You are just postmodern Leninist in sheep's clothing!" they cry. No, the hegemonic position of a form of production in the economy should not imply any political hegemony. Our argument about the hegemony of immaterial labor and the becoming common of all forms of labor is aimed instead at establishing that contemporary conditions tending to form a general communication and collaboration of labor that can be the basis of the multitude.”

Antonio Negri book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

(223)
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Communication, Parting, Cry, Clothes

“Because their possessions were great, the appeasers had much to lose should the Red flag fly over Westminster. That was why they had felt threatened by the hunger riots of 1932. It was also the driving force behind their exorbitant fear and distrust of the new Russia. They had seen a strong Germany as a buffer against Bolshevism, had thought their security would be strengthened if they sidled up to the fierce, virile Third Reich. Nazi coarseness, anti-Semitism, the Reich's darker underside, were rationalized; time, they assured one another, would blur the jagged edges of Nazi Germany. So, with their eyes open, they sought accommodation with a criminal regime, turned a blind eye to its iniquities, ignored its frequent resort to murder and torture, submitted to extortion, humiliation, and abuse until, having sold out all who had sought to stand shoulder to shoulder with Britain and keep the bridge against the new barbarism, they led England herself into the cold damp shadow of the gallows, friendless save for the demoralized republic across the Channel. Their end came when the House of Commons, in a revolt of conscience, wrenched power from them and summoned to the colors the one man who had foretold that all had passed, who had tried, year after year, alone and mocked, to prevent the war by urging the only policy which would have done the job. And now, in the desperate spring of 1940, with the reins of power at last now firm in his grasp, he resolved to lead Britain and her fading empire in one last great struggle worthy of all they had been and meant, to arm the nation, not only with weapons but also with the mace of honor, creating in every English breast a soul beneath the ribs of death.”

William Manchester (1922–2004) (April 1, 1922 – June 1, 2004) American author, journalist and historian

Source: The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Alone 1932-1940 (1988), p. 688-689

Death, Hunger, War, Fear

“What we really need the poet's and orator's I help to keep alive in us is not, then, the common and gregarious courage which Robert Shaw showed when he marched with you, men of the Seventh Regiment. It is that more lonely courage which he showed when he dropped his warm commission in the glorious Second to head your dubious fortunes, negroes of the Fifty-fourth. That lonely kind of courage (civic courage as we call it in times of peace) is the kind of valor to which the monuments of nations should most of all be reared.”

William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist

Robert Gould Shaw: Oration upon the Unveiling of the Shaw Monument http://www.holycross.edu/departments/english/sluria/wjspeech.htm (31 May 1897) 1910s, Memories and Studies (1911)

Men, Peace, Courage, Time

“2762. In Matters of Slander, thou oughtest to suspend thy Judgment, and examine the Thing; and not, as the common Custom is, persuade thyself, that common Report is sufficient warrant for the Truth of the Matters. Popular Opinion is the greatest Lie in the World.”

Thomas Fuller (writer) (1654–1734) British physician, preacher, and intellectual

Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727)

Truth, Lie, World

“The Extras were as clean as they'd ever been in their lives, and their hair - and beards in the case of the older ones - had been laboriously trimmed, in styles that amusingly parodied the latest fashions. Gray had almost gone so far as to have them clothed - but after much experimentation he'd decided against it; even the slightest scrap of clothing made them look too human, and he was acutely aware of the boundary between impressing his guests with his daring, and causing them real discomfort. Of course, naked, the Extras looked exactly like naked humans, but in Gray's cultural milieu, stark naked humans en masse were not a common sight, and so the paradoxical effect of revealing the creatures' totally human appearance was to make it easier to think of them as less than human.”

Greg Egan (1961) Australian science fiction writer and former computer programmer

The Extra http://eidolon.net/?story=The%20Extra, published in Eidolon (Winter 1990) Fiction

Fashion, Thinking, Appearance, Clothes

“In this vast country of ours, people profess different religions, speak different languages, dress differently and observe different customs; but we are one nation; the history of our struggle for independence and our faith in our future development are our common bonds.”

Lal Bahadur Shastri (1904–1966) The second Prime Minister of the Republic of India and a leader of the Indian National Congress party

People, Faith, Religion, History

“The groans of the dying and the blanched set faces of the dead … were enough to drive away all unwholesome feelings of exultation, and to remind one of the grim reality that war is. And even though these were the faces and the sufferings of our enemy, one had … a deeper sense of the common humanity which knows no racial distinctions.”

Jan Smuts (1870–1950) military leader, politician and statesman from South Africa

Smuts in Memoirs of the Boer War, p. 151, as cited in Antony Lentin, 2010, Jan Smuts – Man of courage and vision, p. 15. ISBN 978-1-86842-390-3

War, Feeling, Reality, Sense

“Debates and parliamentary divisions are fruitless cosmetic exercises given the Tories' present Commons majority. And if we recognise this, we are either forced to accept Tory edicts as a fait accompli or we must look to new more militant forms of extra-Parliamentary opposition which involve mass popular participation and challenge the Government's right to rule.”

Peter Tatchell (1952) British gay rights activist

Article in London Labour Briefing, November 1981. When quoted in the House of Commons, Labour Party leader Michael Foot denounced him as the Labour candidate for Bermondsey. Source: Tatchell, The Battle for Bermondsey (Heretic Books, 1983) page 53.

Exercises

“A friend and a prudent friend, can help to shape a friend's decision. He does so by virtue of that love which makes the friend's problem his own, the friend's ego his own (so that after all it is not entirely "from outside"). For by virtue of that oneness which love can establish he is able to visualize the concrete situation calling for decision, visualize it from, as it were, the actual center of responsibility. Therefore it is possible for a friend - only for a friend and only for a prudent friend - to help with counsel and direction to shape a friend's decision or, somewhat in the manner of a judge, help to reshape it.
Such geniune and prudent loving friendship (amor amicitiae) - which has nothing in common with sentimental intimacy, and indeed is rather imperiled by such intimacy - is the sine qua non for geniune spirtual guidance. For only this empowers another to offer the kind of direction which - almost!”

Josef Pieper (1904–1997) German philosopher

conforms to the concrete situation in which the decision must be made.
The Four Cardinal Virtues: Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, Temperance (1965)

Love, Friendship, Problem, Decision

“The incomprehensible richness and loftiness of the Divine Nature, its outpouring generosity toward all in common, fills a man with wonder.”

John Ruysbroeck (1293–1381) Flemish mystic

The Spiritual Espousals (c. 1340)

Nature

“It seems incredible that we should willingly trade certainty for quantum confusion and doubt. But, make no mistake, despite its simplicity, its appealing visual images and its resonance with our common understanding, classical physics failed. The quantum description was built amidst the ruins of the structure that preceded it, and it is therefore appropriate that we begin our journey from within this classical landscape.”

Jim Baggott (1957) British writer

Source: Beyond Measure (2004), Ch. 1 : An act of desperation

Understanding

“The common law of chattels, that is to say, the law ultimately adopted by the King's courts for the regulation of disputes about the ownership and possession of goods, was, to be a substantial extent, a by-product of that new procedure which had been mainly introduced to perfect the feudal scheme of land law.”

Edward Jenks (1861–1939) British legal scholar

Source: A Short History Of The English Law (First Edition) (1912), Chapter V, The Law Of Chattels, p. 55

Law, Perfection

“I thought it strange that medical science spent billions of dollars trying to find a cure for the common cold, and it did nothing to try to stop the aging process. It seemed insane that we were all going to die and nobody talked about it, asked why, or even looked for an answer to it.”

Ray Comfort (1949) New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist

The Defender's Guide for Life's Toughest Questions (2011)

Age, Science

“The greatest problem before engineers and managers today is the economical utilization of labor. The limiting of output by the workman, and the limiting by the employer of the amount a workman is allowed to earn, are both factors which militate against that harmonious co-operation of employer and employee which is essential to their highest common good.”

Henry Gantt (1861–1919) American engineer

H.L. Gantt (1904) paper presented before the International Congress of Arts and Sciences at the Louisiana Purchase Exhibition, St. Louis, 1904. Published in: H.L. Gantt (1910) Work, Wages, and Profits: Their Influence on the Cost of Living. 1910.

Problem

“Among the names of those who have led the great advance of the industrial arts during the past thirty years, that of Frederick Winslow Taylor will hold an increasingly high place. Others have led in electrical development, in the steel industry, in industrial chemistry, in railroad equipment, in the textile arts, and in many other fields, but he has been the creator of a new science, which underlies and will benefit all of these others by greatly increasing their efficiency and augmenting their productivity. In addition, he has literally forged a new tool for the metal trades, which has doubled, or even trebled, the productive capacity of nearly all metal-cutting machines. Either achievement would entitle him to high rank among the notable men of his day; — the two combined give him an assured place among the world's leaders in the industrial arts.
Others without number have been organizers of industry and commerce, each working out, with greater or less success, the solution of his own problems, but none perceiving that many of these problems involved common factors and thus implied the opportunity and the need of an organized science. Mr. Taylor was the first to grasp this fact and to perceive that in this field, as in the physical sciences, the Baconian system could be applied, that a practical science could be created by following the three principles of that system, viz.: the correct and complete observation oi facts, the intelligent and unbiased analysis of such facts, and the formulating of laws by deduction from the results so reached. Not only did he comprehend this fundamental conception and apply it; he also grasped the significance and possibilities of the problem so fully that his codification of the fundamental principles of the system he founded is practically complete and will be a lasting monument to its founder.”

Henry R. Towne (1844–1924) American engineer

Henry R. Towne, in: Frank Barkley Copley, Frederick W. Taylor, father of scientific management https://archive.org/stream/frederickwtaylor01copl, 1923. p. xii.

Men, World, Law, Art

“I have tried to make clear in this brief sketch of the nature of deductively formulated theories, at least as they occur in economics, that, although their origin lies in common observation and introspection, nevertheless they are capable of a purely mathematical development through the exact statement of a of a set of postulates which, however, since they must inevitably contain assumptions about human behaviour, require to be tested by reference to actual events.”

Richard Stone (1913–1991) British economist, Nobel Memorial Prize winner

Source: The Role of Measurement in Economics. 1951, p. 14-15

Mathematics, Nature

“His hypothesis goes to this — to make the common run of his readers fancy they can do all that can be done by genius, and to make the man of genius believe he can only do what is to be done by mechanical rules and systematic industry. This is not a very feasible scheme; nor is Sir Joshua sufficiently clear and explicit in his reasoning in support of it.”

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer

"On Certain Inconsistencies in Sir Joshua Reynolds' Discourses" Table Talk: Essays On Men And Manners http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Essays/TableHazIV.htm (1821-1822)

Support

“Tonight Vietnam must hold the center of our attention, but across the world problems and opportunities crowd in on the American Nation. I will discuss them fully in the months to come, and I will follow the five continuing lines of policy that America has followed under its last four Presidents. The first principle is strength. Tonight I can tell you that we are strong enough to keep all of our commitments. We will need expenditures of $58.3 billion for the next fiscal year to maintain this necessary defense might. While special Vietnam expenditures for the next fiscal year are estimated to increase by $5.8 billion, I can tell you that all the other expenditures put together in the entire federal budget will rise this coming year by only $0.6 billion. This is true because of the stringent cost-conscious economy program inaugurated in the Defense Department, and followed by the other departments of government. A second principle of policy is the effort to control, and to reduce, and to ultimately eliminate the modern engines of destruction. We will vigorously pursue existing proposals—and seek new ones—to control arms and to stop the spread of nuclear weapons. A third major principle of our foreign policy is to help build those associations of nations which reflect the opportunities and the necessities of the modern world. By strengthening the common defense, by stimulating world commerce, by meeting new hopes, these associations serve the cause of a flourishing world. We will take new steps this year to help strengthen the Alliance for Progress, the unity of Europe, the community of the Atlantic, the regional organizations of developing continents, and that supreme association—the United Nations. We will work to strengthen economic cooperation, to reduce barriers to trade, and to improve international finance.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

1960s, State of the Union Address (1966)

World, Hope, Communication, Problem

“When we are sick, we want an uncommon doctor; when we have a construction job to do, we want an uncommon engineer, and when we are at war, we want an uncommon general. It is only when we get into politics that we are satisfied with the common man.”

Herbert Hoover (1874–1964) 31st President of the United States of America

From an article originally published in the February 6, 1949 issue of "This Week" Magazine, from "Addresses Upon the American Road,Volume: Volume 8: 1955-1960." Developed in speech entitled "Moral and Spiritual Recovery from War" presented October 13, 1945, at 75th Anniversary of Wilson College at Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. "The Crusade Years, 1933–1955: Herbert Hoover's Lost Memoir of the New Deal Era and Its Aftermath", edited by George Nash
The Uncommon Man

War

Quotes about common page 17

Quotes about common
page 17