Quotes about ordinary
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“We are built for the valley, for the ordinary stuff we are in, and that is where we have to prove our mettle.”

Oswald Chambers (1874–1917) British missionary

“Recovery unfolds in three stages. The central task of the first stage is the establishment of safety. The central task of the second stage is remembrance and mourning. The central focus of the third stage is reconnection with ordinary life.”

Judith Lewis Herman (1942) American psychiatrist

Source: Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

Life

“Ivan Ilych's life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.”

Leo Tolstoy The Death of Ivan Ilyich

Source: The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), Ch. II
Source: The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories

Life

“Why live an ordinary life, when you can live an extraordinary one.”

Anthony Robbins (1960) Author, actor, professional speaker

Life

“This is not a book in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty… what you will.”

Henry Miller book Tropic of Cancer

Source: Tropic of Cancer (1934), Chapter One
Context: This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty... what you will.

Love, God, Books, Beauty

“In ordinary life we hardly realize that we receive a great deal more than we give, and that it is only with gratitude that life becomes rich.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) German Lutheran pastor, theologian, dissident anti-Nazi

Life, Gratitude

“It was going to be so much fun dragging his complacent sexual views out of the ordinary and into the extraordinary.”

Keri Arthur Australian writer

Source: Full Moon Rising

“There were few things worse than being ordinary, in Evie’s opinion. Ordinary was for suckers.”

Libba Bray book The Diviners

Source: The Diviners

“Because the world isn't divided into the special and the ordinary. Everyone has the potential to be extra ordinary.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Heavenly Fire

Source: City of Heavenly Fire

World

“What looks like crazy on an ordinary day looks looks a lot like love if you catch it in the moonlight.”

Pearl Cleage What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day

Source: What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day

Love

“You have ordinary moments and ordinary moments and more ordinary moments, and then, suddenly, there is something monumental right there. You have past and future colliding in the present, your own personal Big Bang, and nothing will ever be the same.”

Deb Caletti (1963) American writer

Source: Stay

Past, Future, Personality

“You enter the extraordinary by way of the ordinary”

Frederick Buechner (1926) Poet, novelist, short story writer, theologian

Way

“We need faith and the mind of the Lord Jesus to recognize something of lasting value in even our most ordinary tasks.”

Philip Yancey (1949) American writer

Faith

“Time stands still best in moments that look suspiciously like ordinary life.”

Brian Andreas (1956) American artist

Life, Time

“I do not accept that life has an ordinary shape, or that there is anything ordinary about life at all. We make it ordinary, but it is not.”

Jeanette Winterson book Lighthousekeeping

Source: Lighthousekeeping

Life

“Perfect Day:
It was a day filled with the glow of ordinary things & we passed them quietly from hand to hand for a long time & someone said she had picked a perfect day to be born & I think all of us felt the same.”

Brian Andreas (1956) American artist

Thinking, Time, Perfection

“To think of him in the middle of the day lifts me out of ordinary living.”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

Source: The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

Thinking

“Reuven, as you grow older you will discover that the most important things that will happen to you will often come as a result of silly things, as you call them— "ordinary things" is a better expression. That is the way the world is.”

Chaim Potok book The Chosen

David Malter to Reuven Malter (p. 110)
Source: The Chosen (1967)

World, Way

“One who desired knowledge of man apart from the fruits of knowledge would seek it in the history of religious enthusiasm, of martyrdom, or of love; he would not seek it in the market-place. When we elect to watch the play of human motives that are ordinary — that are sometimes mean and dismal and ignoble — our impulse is not the philosopher's impulse, knowledge for the sake of knowledge, but rather the physiologist's, knowledge for the healing that knowledge may help to bring.”

Arthur Cecil Pigou (1877–1959) British economist

Source: The Economics of Welfare (1920), Ch. 1 : Welfare and Economic Welfare, § 1

Love, History, Motivation, Knowledge

“When the profits of trade happen to be greater than ordinary, over-trading becomes a general error both among great and small dealers.”

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

Source: (1776), Book IV, Chapter I, p. 469.

Error

“Buddhas bear the same relation to sentient beings as water does to ice. Ice, like stone or brick, cannot flow. But when it melts it flows freely in conformity with its surroundings. So long as one remains in a state of delusion he is like ice. Upon realization he becomes as exquisitely free as water. And remember, there is no ice which does not return to water. So you will understand there is no difference between ordinary beings and Buddhas except for one thing - delusion. When it is dissolved they are identical.”

Bassui Tokushō (1327–1387) Japanese monk

Source: Letter to the abbess of Shinryu-ji https://sites.google.com/site/esabsnichtenglisch/bassui-tokusho-the-letters

Understanding, Water

“So long as commerce specializes in business methods which take no account of human nature and social motives, so long may we expect strikes and sabotage to be the ordinary accompaniment of industry. Sabotage is essentially a protest of the human spirit against dull mechanism. And the emphasis which democracy places upon political methods tends to transform mere sporadic acts of sabotage into an organized conspiracy against society.”

Elton Mayo (1880–1949) Australian academic

Source: Democracy and freedom. 1919, p. 56

Democracy, Motivation, Business, Nature

“The decline of Indian Buddhism was centrally due to the fact that it never offered the Indian laity a complete religion. Early Buddhism knew no ceremonies for birth and death, marriage, illness, and other critical turns of private life… Only for the community of monks did Buddhism provide a complete and well-defined way of life. …But Brahmins were needed for all the ordinary crises in life, ready with their rites and sacred formulas to ward off danger or minimize the damage. This elemental fact assured the survival of Brahminism in India.”

William H. McNeill book The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community

The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (1963)

Life, Death, Marriage, Religion

“What is actually happening now is that monoploy capitalism needs the state to disempower ordinary people's institutions and lives. What we are actually developing in modern Europe is a post-democratic society. We are creating an oligarchical elite structure where moneyed elites, the elites of industry cohabit with political elites and they move into each other's regimes and spaces. So we have now produced what I would call a market state, and the market state really just exists for the benefit of those in the top. And there is clear economic and social evidence for this, it is very clear that only those at the very top of society in the developed world have really benefited from the last thirty years.”

Phillip Blond (1966) British philosopher

Money, People, World

“Inflation is a simple idea: imagine that the universe begins in a tiny patch of space dominated by the potential energy of some scalar field, a kind of super-dense dark energy. This causes that patch to expand at a terrifically accelerated rate, smoothing out the density and diluting away any unwanted relics. Eventually the scalar field decays into ordinary matter and radiation, reheating the universe into a conventional Big Bang state, after which things proceed as normal.”

Sean Carroll (1966) American theoretical cosmologist

[The Eternally Existing, Self-reproducing, Frequently Puzzling Inflationary Universe, Preposterous Universe blog, 21 October 2011, http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2011/10/21/the-eternally-existing-self-reproducing-frequently-puzzling-inflationary-universe/]

Imagination, Idea, Universe

“I have been working with silicone for years. While still studying, I painted on unusual materials, for example on a soft felt. I like material that easily surrenders – you can tame them and "go out" to the third dimension, and at the same time sanctify something that is considered ordinary. Once, I painted on sponges over twenty centimeters long, which create a great illusion of sandstone.”

Tomasz Vetulani (1965) Polish artist

Tomasz Vetulani o Holandii, niskim kraju http://www.nto.pl/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110605/REPORTAZ01/762330357, nto.pl, 5 June 2011 (in Polish)

Study, Time, Painting

“I have merely attempted to put the view of the universe and man's place in it which is common to all mystics in plain and untechnical language: and to suggest the practical conditions under which ordinary persons may participate in their experience.”

Evelyn Underhill book Practical Mysticism

Preface, p. 16
Practical Mysticism (1914)

Universe, Personality

“When one deals with the Murthe, the unthinkable becomes the ordinary, and Zanzel's repute carries no more weight than last year's mouse-dropping - if that much.”

Jack Vance (1916–2013) American mystery and speculative fiction writer

"The Murthe", chapter 2
Quotations and text from the Dying Earth novels, Rhialto the Marvellous (1984)

“The majority of mankind is lazy-minded, incurious, absorbed in vanities, and tepid in emotion, and is therefore incapable of either much doubt or much faith; and when the ordinary man calls himself a sceptic or an unbeliever, that is ordinarily a simple pose, cloaking a disinclination to think anything out to a conclusion.”

T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) 20th century English author

Introduction to Pascal’s Pensées

Faith, Thinking

“Notwithstanding all the differences in the aims and tasks of the Russian revolution, compared with the French revolution of 1871, the Russian proletariat had to resort to the same method of struggle as that first used by the Paris Commune — civil war. Mindful of the lessons of the Commune, it knew that the proletariat should not ignore peaceful methods of struggle — they serve its ordinary, day-to-day interests, they are necessary in periods of preparation for revolution — but it must never forget that in certain conditions the class struggle assumes the form of armed conflict and civil war; there are times when the interests of the proletariat call for ruthless extermination of its enemies in open armed clashes.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

“Lessons of the Commune”, in Zagranichnaya Gazeta, No. 2 (23 March 1908) http://www.marx.org/archive/lenin/works/1908/mar/23.htm, as translated by Bernard Isaacs, Collected Works, Vol. 13, p. 478. <br class="br">1900s <br class="br">Variant: The proletariat should not ignore peaceful methods of struggle — they serve its ordinary, day-to-day interests, they are necessary in periods of preparation for revolution — but it must never forget that in certain conditions the class struggle assumes the form of armed conflict and civil war; there are times when the interests of the proletariat call for ruthless extermination of its enemies in open armed clashes. This was first demonstrated by the French proletariat in the Commune and brilliantly confirmed by the Russian proletariat in the December uprising.

War, Peace, Communication, Time

“My aunt is convinced I have a "flair for research." This is not true. If I had a flair for research, I would be doing research. Actually I'm not very smart. My grades were average. My mother and my aunt think I am smart because I am quiet and absent-minded–and because my father and grandfather were smart. They think I was meant to do research because I am not fit to do anything else–I am a genius whom ordinary professions can't satisfy.”

Walker Percy book The Moviegoer

The Moviegoer (1961)

Thinking

“It would be different if there were some great widespread public indigonation and demand: "Away with the prescriptive upper house of Parliament". There is not. There was recently carried out by Mr. McKenzie and a colleague of his a survey of working-class political attitudes called Angels in Marble. They found that "only one-third of the entire working class sample, and only a slightly higher proportion of Labour voters, favoured abolishing the Lords or altering it in any way…About a third of the whole sample" of working-class voters in the country "see the Lords as an intrinsic part of the national tradition or of the government of the country." As so often, the ordinary rank and file of the electorate have seen a truth, an important fact, which has escaped so many more clever people—the underlying value of that which is traditional, of that which is prescriptive.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Speech in the House of Commons http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1968/nov/19/house-of-lords-reform#S5CV0773P0_19681119_HOC_305 (19 November 1968) regarding proposals for reforming the House of Lords. <br class="br">1960s

People, Truth, Angels, Way

“I've always given everything for every team I've played for so that the ordinary fans, the people in the stadium, could identify with me. I owe a lot to the fans of Roma, Fiorentina and Argentina. They were the reason I played, my inspiration. I always worked hard to improve my game, to prove to myself that I could be one of the best for as long as possible. To be honest, I couldn’t care less what the others think.”

Gabriel Batistuta (1969) Argentine association football player

Batistuta's quiet goodbye, FIFA.com, 2006-08-13, 11 July 2005 http://fifa.com/en/news/feature/0,1451,108450,00.html,

People, Game, Thinking

“The philosophy which affects to teach us a contempt of money does not run very deep; for, indeed, it ought to be still more clear to the philosopher than it is to ordinary men, that there are few things in the world of greater importance.”

Henry Taylor (1800–1886) English playwright and poet

Money.
Notes from Life (1853)

Men, Money, World

“For too long our culture has said, "If it feels good, do it." Now America is embracing a new ethic and a new creed: "Let's roll". In the sacrifice of soldiers, the fierce brotherhood of firefighters, and the bravery and generosity of ordinary citizens, we have glimpsed what a new culture of responsibility could look like. We want to be a nation that serves goals larger than self. We've been offered a unique opportunity, and we must not let this moment pass.”

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

Invoking the words of Todd Beamer (passenger on ill-fated Flight 93 on September 11, 2001) to suggest Americans are becoming more altruistic and willing to sacrifice. State of the Union Address (January 29, 2002)
2000s, 2002, State of the Union address (January 2002)

Feeling

“There is a striking kinship between our movement and Margaret Sanger's early efforts. She, like we, saw the horrifying conditions of ghetto life. Like we, she knew that all of society is poisoned by cancerous slums. Like we, she was a direct actionist — a nonviolent resister. She was willing to accept scorn and abuse until the truth she saw was revealed to the millions. At the turn of the century she went into the slums and set up a birth control clinic, and for this deed she went to jail because she was violating an unjust law. Yet the years have justified her actions. She launched a movement which is obeying a higher law to preserve human life under humane conditions. Margaret Sanger had to commit what was then called a crime in order to enrich humanity, and today we honor her courage and vision; for without them there would have been no beginning. Our sure beginning in the struggle for equality by nonviolent direct action may not have been so resolute without the tradition established by Margaret Sanger and people like her. Negroes have no mere academic nor ordinary interest in family planning. They have a special and urgent concern.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, Family Planning - A Special and Urgent Concern (1966)

Life, People, Truth, Family

“The same good sense, that directs men in the ordinary occurrences of life, is not hearkened to in religious matters, which are supposed to be placed altogether above the cognizance of human reason.”

David Hume book Four Dissertations

Four Dissertations (1757)

Life, Men, Sense

“The writer is an ordinary man, not a spokesman for the people, and that literature can only be the voice of one individual. Writing that becomes an ode to a country, the standard of a nation, the voice of a party… loses its nature—it is no longer literature. Writers do not set out to be published, but to know themselves. Although Kafka or Pessoa resorted to language, it was not in order to change the world. I, myself, believe in what I call cold literature: a literature of flight for one's life, a literature that is not utilitarian, but a spiritual self-preservation in order to avoid being stifled by society. I believe in a literature of the moment, for the living. You have to know how to use freedom. If you use it in exchange for something else, it vanishes.”

Gao Xingjian (1940) Chinese novelist and playwright

Interview by Jean-Luc Douin http://web.archive.org/web/20130421061108/http://my.opera.com/PRC/blog/?startidx=560

Life, People, World, Literature

“I once said that I would support any decision that Senator Grace makes regarding her role in the 2016 elections. As a candidate or ordinary supporter, I’m prepared to stand by her, just as I did for FPJ over 11 years ago.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

2015, Speech: Declaration as Vice Presidential Candidate

Support, Decision

“Whether we believe the Greek poet, "it is sometimes even pleasant to be mad", or Plato, "he who is master of himself has knocked in vain at the doors of poetry"; or Aristotle, "no great genius was without a mixture of insanity"; the mind cannot express anything lofty and above the ordinary unless inspired. When it despises the common and the customary, and with sacred inspiration rises higher, then at length it sings something grander than that which can come from mortal lips. It cannot attain anything sublime and lofty so long as it is sane: it must depart from the customary, swing itself aloft, take the bit in its teeth, carry away its rider and bear him to a height whither he would have feared to ascend alone.”

Seneca the Younger (-4–65 BC) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, and dramatist

In Latin, nullum magnum ingenium sine mixtura dementiae fuit (There is no great genius without some touch of madness). This passage by Seneca is the source most often cited in crediting Aristotle with this thought, but in Problemata xxx. 1, Aristotle says: 'Why is it that all those who have become eminent in philosophy or politics or poetry or the arts are clearly melancholic?' The quote by Plato is from the Dialogue Phaedrus (245a).
On Tranquility of the Mind

Fear, Singing, Madness

“Nations are not truly great solely because the individuals composing them are numerous, free, and active; but they are great when these numbers, this freedom, and this activity are employed in the service of an ideal higher than that of an ordinary man, taken by himself.”

Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools

"Democracy" (1861)

Freedom

“Industrial progress, mechanical improvement, all of the great wonders of the modern era have meant little to the wealthy. The rich in ancient Greece would have benefited hardly at all from modern plumbing — running servants replaced running water. Television and radio — the patricians of Rome could enjoy the leading musicians and actors in their home, could have the leading artists as domestic retainers. Ready-to-wear clothing, supermarkets — all these and many other modern developments would have added little to their life. They would have welcomed the improvements in transportation and in medicine, but for the rest, the great achievements of western capitalism have rebounded primarily to the benefit of the ordinary person. These achievements have made available to the masses conveniences and amenities that were previously the exclusive prerogative of the rich and powerful.”

Milton Friedman book Free to Choose

Source: Free to Choose (1980), Ch. 5 “Created Equal”, p. 147

Life, Home, Water, Personality

“Movie actors are just ordinary mixed-up people—with agents.”

Jean Kerr (1922–2003) Irish-American author and playwright

Mary, Mary, Act II http://books.google.com/books?id=8YuwAAAAIAAJ&q=%22Movie+actors+are+just+ordinary+mixed-up+people+with+agents%22&pg=PA74#v=onepage (1961)

People

“The Arab world has seen elections before. However, virtually all of them were artificial affairs, their outcomes never in doubt. They were in the end celebrations of one version or another of autocracy, never a repudiation of them. That kind of state-management is not what has just taken place in Iraq. Millions of people actually made choices, and placed claims on those who will lead them in the future. To act upon one's own world like this, and on such a scale, is what politics in the purest sense is all about. It is why we all, once upon a time, became activists. And it is infectious. The taste of freedom is a hard memory to rub out. No wonder the political and intellectual elites of the Arab world are so worried, and no wonder they were so hostile to everything that happened in Iraq since the overthrow of the Saddam regime. They had longed for failure. They trotted out the tired old formulas of anti-Americanism to impart legitimacy to the so-called Iraqi "resistance to American occupation." But the people of Iraq have put an end to all that. En masse, ordinary people took to the streets in the second great Iraqi revolt against the politics of barbarism exemplified by Abu Musab al Zarqawi's immortal words: "We have declared a bitter war against the principle of democracy and all those who seek to enact it."”

Kanan Makiya (1949) American orientalist

"The Shiite Obligation", Wall Street Journal (February 7, 2005)

Hostility, War, People, World

“The emotional masses of ordinary people who resented the Great Work, the bombs and bacteria and guided missiles, were coming to the surface. The were rising up - finally. Putting an end to super-logic: rationality without responsibility.”

Philip K. Dick book Null-O

"Null-O"
The Phillip K. Dick Reader

People

“God made Homo sapiens a problem-solving creature. The trouble is that He gave us too many resources: too many languages, too many phases of life, too many levels of complexity, too many ways to solve problems, too many contexts in which to solve them, and too many values to balance.
First came the law, accounting, and history which looks backward in time for their values and decision-making criteria, but their paradigm (casuistry) cannot look forward to predict future consequences. Casuistry is overly rigid and does not account for statistical phenomena. To look forward man used two thousand years to evolve scientific method - which can predict the future when it discovers the laws of nature. In parallel, man evolved engineering, and later, systems engineering, which also anticipates future conditions. It took man to the moon, but it often did, and does, a poor job of understanding social systems, and also often ignores the secondary effects of its artifacts on the environment.
Environmental impact analysis was promoted by governments to patch over the weakness of engineering - with modest success - and it does not ignore history; but by not integrating with system design, it is also an incomplete philosophy. System design and architecture, or simply design, like science and engineering is forward-looking, and provides man with comforts and conveniences - if someone will tell them what problems to solve, and which requirements to meet. It rarely collects wisdom from the backward-looking methodologies, often overlooks ordinary operating problems in designing its artifacts, whether autos or buildings, and often ignores the principles of good teamwork.”

Arthur D. Hall (1925–2006) American electrical engineer

Source: Metasystems Methodology, (1989), p.xi cited in Philip McShane (2004) Cantower VII http://www.philipmcshane.ca/cantower7.pdf

Life, Wisdom, God, Law

“She continued, 'Theirs was a religion of freedom and joy and not pervaded by fanatical and morbid asceticism as some people would have us believe.' Here again I feel she is absolutely right. The critics of Catharism fail to distinguish between the Parfait and the ordinary croyant. The latter were not required to fast and mortify the flesh any more than the average Hindu or Roman Catholic, even though both Hindu and Catholic priests may regularly practise asceticism as well as meditation and other such disciplines.”

Arthur Guirdham (1905–1992) British physician, psychiatrist and writer

Source: The Cathars and Reincarnation (1970), p. 100

People, Religion, Feeling, Freedom

“The unusual treatment began soon after his birth, when Micheau was sent to live with a humble family in a nearby village. Having a peasant wet-nurse was normal enough, but Montaigne’s father wanted his son to absorb an understanding of commoners’ ways along with their breast milk, so that be would grow up comfortable with the people who most needed a seigneur’s help. Instead of bringing a nurse to the baby, therefore, he sent the baby to the nurse, and left him there long enough to be weaned. Even at the christening, Pierre [Montaigne’s father] had “people of the lowest class” hold the infant over the font. From the start, Montaigne had the impression at once of being a peasant among peasants, and of being very special and different. This is the mixture of feelings that would stay with him for life. H felt ordinary, but knew that the very fact of realizing his ordinariness made him extraordinary.”

Sarah Bakewell book How to Live

Source: How to Live, or, A Life of Montaigne in one Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer (2010), p. 52.

Life, People, Family, Way

“The fundamental thesis of ordinary conventionalism, represented for instance by Poincare, states that there are problems which cannot be solved by appeal to experience unless one introduces a certain convention, since only such a convention, together with experimental data, makes it possible to solve the problem in question. The judgements which combine to make up such a solution are thus not forced on us by empirical data alone, but their adoption depends partly on our recognition, since the said convention which co-determines the solution of the problem can be arbitrarily changed by us so that as a result we obtain different judgements.
In the present paper it is my intention to make that thesis of ordinary conventionalism more general and more radical. Namely, we want to formulate and to prove the theorem that not only some, but all the judgements which we accept and which combine to make up our image of the world are not univocally determined by empirical data, but depend on the choice of the conceptual apparatus by means of which we make mappings of those empirical data. We can, however, choose this or that conceptual apparatus, which will change our whole image of the world.”

Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz (1890–1963) Philosopher, logician

Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz, "Das Weltbild und die Begriffsapparatur", in Erkenntnis, 1934, Vol. 4, p. 259; as cited in: Schaff (1962;81-82)

World, Question, Problem, Change

“A revolution will only be achieved when the ordinary people of the world, us, the working class, get up off our knees and take back what is rightfully ours.”

James Connolly (1868–1916) Irish republican and socialist leader

As cited in Legendary Locals of Troy, New York (2011), p. 11

People, World

“Rhythm and repetition of sounds, words and phrases make spoken poetry sound different to ordinary discourse.”

John Hollander (1929–2013) American poet

“The premise of $600+ mobile device sales as a mainstream purchase by ordinary Americans, never mind overpriced $300 plastic-cased watches, appears to be a fantasy dream. The iFemineProduct has quite-clearly peaked and started its decline …”

Karl Denninger American businessman

Bubble, Meet Pin http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=230072 in The Market Ticker (28 April 2015)

Dreams, Appearance

“The key intellectual event is a lecture or a formal debate, a period of time when one individual holds the floor to deliver a sustained argument on a particular topic. This is different from the give-and-take of sociable conversations, which typically cannot reach any complex or abstract level because the focus shifts too often. Intellectuals giving their attention for half an hour or more to one viewpoint, developed as a unified stream of discourse, are thereby elevating the topic into a larger, more encompassing sacred object than the little fragmentary tokens of ordinary sociable ties.”

Randall Collins (1941) American sociologist

Source: The Sociology of Philosophies (1998), p. 26

Time

“[…]since humanity is above partisanship, the Italians are no doubt equally kind to Germans who come to them for help in similar circumstances, and I find it deplorable that we should show anger and vindictiveness when cases of Italians showing even ordinary compassion to their one-time allies come to our notice.”

Norman Lewis book Naples '44

Naples '44

Time, Help, Anger

“Broadly speaking, then, the best type of management in ordinary use may be defined as management in which the workmen give their best initiative and in return receive some special incentive from their employers. This type of management will be referred to as the management of “initiative and incentive” in contradistinction to scientific management, or task management, with which it is to be compared.”

Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856–1915) American mechanical engineer and tennis player

Source: Principles of Scientific Management, 1911, p. 87 (2014 ed.).

“At common law, the Attorney-General is, when he is exercising his functions as an officer of the Crown, in no case that I know of a Court in the ordinary sense.”

Charles Bowen (1835–1894) English judge

In the matter of Van Gelder's Patent (1888), 6 Rep. Pat. Cas. 28

Law, Exercises, Sense

“I have always directed my attempts at the figurative representation of objects by way of summary and not very descriptive brushstrokes, diverging greatly from the real objective measurements of things, and this has led many people to talk about childish drawing.... this position of seeing them [the objects] without looking at them too much, without focusing more attention on them than any ordinary man would in normal everyday life..”

Jean Dubuffet book Prospectus et tous écrits suivants

Source: 1960-70's, Prospectus et tous écrits suivants, 1967, p. 105

Life, People, Way, Drawing

“So let us listen to the light—what music do we hear? For one thing, we can elicit from each chemical element its own, unique chord. You may sometimes have noticed that a bright yellow flash is produced if ordinary table salt is sprinkled on a flame…a first bare hint of the subject of flame spectra… The fact that different elements emit light with different color characteristics is exploited by the makers of fireworks.”

Frank Wilczek (1951) physicist

Longing for the Harmonies: Themes and Variations from Modern Physics (1987)

Music, Color, Light

“The only secondary cause… which has, as yet, been even conjecturally brought forward, to explain how, in the ordinary course of nature, a new specific form may be generated is, as Lamarck declared, 'variation,' and this has been rendered a far more probable hypothesis by the way in which Natural Selection is shown to give intensity and permanency to certain varieties.”

Charles Lyell (1797–1875) British lawyer and geologist

Source: The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man (1863), Ch.21, p. 422

Way, Nature

“In the middle of the work of art, an artist often feels that he is failing. And he starts interfering with his inspiration. That is a mistake. The mistake. It is best to push on through. Such works frequently turn out to be the best. To fail is a very ordinary experience for an artist. To fail and fail and still go on, marks his character. Most people cannot bear to fail, even once. They think of security.”

Agnes Martin (1912–2004) American artist

1980 - 2000, The Skowhegan Lecture', 1987

People, Art, Feeling, Thinking

“Here then (belove reader) thou hast this work devided into two treatises, the first is the said introduction and reasoning, for investigation of the true sense of every cheife Theological tearme and date contained in the Revelation, whereby, not onely is it opened, explained and interpreted, but also that same explanation and interpretation is proved, confirmed and demonstrated, by evidente proofe and coherence of scriptures, agreeable with the event of histories. The seconde is, the principall treatise, in which the whole Apocalyps, Chapter by chapter, Verse by verse, and Sentence by sentence, is both Paraphrastically expounded and Historically applyed. …And because this whole work of Revelation concerneth most the discoverie of the Antichristian and Papisticall kingdome, I have therefore (for removing of all suspition) in al histories and prophane matters, taken my authorities and cited my places either out of Ethnick auctors, or then papistical writers, whose testimonies by no reason can be refuted against themselves. But in matters of divinitie, doctrine & interpretation of mysteries (leaving all opinions of men) I take me onely to the interpretation and discoverie thereof, by coherence of scripture, and godly reasons following thereupon; which also not only no Papist, but even no Christian may justly refuse. And forasmuch as our scripturs herein are of two fortes, the one our ordinary text, the other extraordinary citations; In our ordinary text, I follow not altogether the vulgar English translation, but the best learned in the Greek tong, so that (for satisfying the Papists) I differ nothing from their vulgar text of S. Jerome, as they cal it, except is such places, where I prove by good reasons, that hee differeth from the Original Greek. In the extraordinary texts of other scriptures cited by me, I followe ever Jeromes latine translation, where any controverse stands betwixt us and the Papists, and that moveth me in divers places to insert his very latine text, for their cause, with the just English thereof, for supply of the unlearned.”

John Napier (1550–1617) Scottish mathematician

A Plaine Discovery of the Whole Revelation of St. John (1593)

Men, History, Sense, Learning

“Everybody must have wished at some time that poetry were written by nice ordinary people instead of poets—and, in a better world, it may be; but in this world writers like Constance Carrier are the well oysters that don’t have the pearls.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“Recent Poetry”, p. 225
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

People, World, Time

“The historical era is, we know, only a small portion of the entire age of our globe. We do not know what may have happened during the ages which preceded its commencement, as we do not know what may happen in ages yet in the distant future. All, therefore, that we can properly infer from the apparently invariable production of like by like is, that such is the ordinary procedure of nature in the time immediately passing before our eyes.”

Robert Chambers (publisher, born 1802) book Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation

Source: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 211

Age, Nature, Distant, Time

“Take me. I'm an ordinary player in the key of C.
And my will was broken by my pride and my vanity.
Who's gonna love you when you're looks are gone?
God will. Like he waters the flowers on your window sill.”

Paul Simon (1941) American musician, songwriter and producer

Outrageous
Song lyrics, Surprise (2006)

Love, God, Flowers, Water

“I had directed drawpipes, connected with the deep well, toward an ordinary star, and the start had faded out four times. There was no mistake about it. Three more people had seen it. There was only one conclusion: The thing we had drawn from was not a star. It was something else; a UFO.”

Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957) Austrian-American psychoanalyst

Contact with Space (1957)

People, Star, Time

“Here’s what I want you to know: We got through that tumultuous time. We revved up the engine of imagination and innovation. We turned back a tide of intolerance and embraced inclusion. The we who did those things were more than those in power who wanted to change course. It was millions of ordinary citizens, especially young people, who voted, marched, and organized. You may have heard that things didn’t exactly go as planned, but you know what? I’m doing okay. I’ve gotten to spend time with my family, especially my amazing grandchildren. Long walks in the woods. Organizing my closets, right? I won’t lie — Chardonnay helped a little.”

Hillary Clinton (1947) American politician, senator, Secretary of State, First Lady

Post Presidential Election, Wellesley Commencement Speech (2017)

People, Lie, Family, Imagination

“Countless attempts have been made to no avail to construct a continuity from the supreme principle of the intellectual world to the finite world. The oldest and most frequent of these attempts is well known: the principle of emanation, according to which the outflowings from the godhead, in gradual increments and detachment from the ordinary source, losing their divine perfection until, in the end, they pass into the opposite (matter, privation), just as light is finally confined by darkness. P. 24”

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–1854) German philosopher (idealism)

Philosophy and Religion 1804)

World, Light, Perfection

“Well, I want to start out that I was lucky in the ‘60s to also be taking a class in Classical Ethology by a professor named Tom Evans, where I learned that operant conditioning does not explain all animal behavior. He explained how fixed action patterns and hardwired instinctual behavior works. And I remember going on a visit to Dr. Skinner and I felt like I was visiting, you know, the grand temple of psychology. And I went up to his office and, you know, he seemed, I'm like, "oh, you mean he's actually an ordinary person?" And we got to talking and of course back then I wore a dress you know ‘cause, you know, ladies had to be, like, dressed up, and I had a very conservative dress on, and B. F. Skinner touched my legs.”

Temple Grandin (1947) USA-american doctor of animal science, author, and autism activist

Behavior, Learning, Animals, Personality

“Her point of view about student work was that of a social worker teaching finger-painting to children or the insane.
I was impressed with how common such an attitude was at Benton: the faculty—insofar as they were real Benton faculty, and not just nomadic barbarians—reasoned with the students, “appreciated their point of view”, used Socratic methods on them, made allowances for them, kept looking into the oven to see if they were done; but there was one allowance they never under any circumstances made—that the students might be right about something, and they wrong. Education, to them, was a psychiatric process: the sign under which they conquered had embroidered at the bottom, in small letters, Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased?—and half of them gave it its Babu paraphrase of Can you wait upon a lunatic? One expected them to refer to former students as psychonanalysts do: “Oh, she’s an old analysand of mine.” They felt that the mind was a delicate plant which, carefully nurtured, judiciously left alone, must inevitably adopt for itself even the slightest of their own beliefs.
One Benton student, a girl noted for her beadth of reading and absence of coöperation, described things in a queer, exaggerated, plausible way. According to her, a professor at an ordinary school tells you “what’s so”, you admit that it is on examination, and what you really believe or come to believe has “that obscurity which is the privilege of young things”. But at Benton, where education was as democratic as in “that book about America by that French writer—de, de—you know the one I mean”; she meant de Tocqueville; there at Benton they wanted you really to believe everything they did, especially if they hadn’t told you what it was. You gave them the facts, the opinions of authorities, what you hoped was their own opinion; but they replied, “That’s not the point. What do you yourself really believe?” If it wasn’t what your professors believed, you and they could go on searching for your real belief forever—unless you stumbled at last upon that primal scene which is, by definition, at the root of anything….
When she said primal scene there was so much youth and knowledge in her face, so much of our first joy in created things, that I could not think of Benton for thinking of life. I suppose she was right: it is as hard to satisfy our elders’ demands of Independence as of Dependence. Harder: how much more complicated and indefinite a rationalization the first usually is!—and in both cases, it is their demands that must be satisfied, not our own. The faculty of Benton had for their students great expectations, and the students shook, sometimes gave, beneath the weight of them. If the intellectual demands were not so great as they might have been, the emotional demands made up for it. Many a girl, about to deliver to one of her teachers a final report on a year’s not-quite-completed project, had wanted to cry out like a child, “Whip me, whip me, Mother, just don’t be Reasonable!””

Randall Jarrell book Pictures from an Institution

Source: Pictures from an Institution (1954) [novel], Chapter 3, pp. 81–83

Life, Children, Books, Youth

“Semiotics… is not concerned with the study of a particular kind of object, but with ordinary objects in so far (and only in so far) as they participate in semiosis.”

Charles W. Morris (1903–1979) American philosopher

Source: "Foundations of the Theory of Signs," 1938, p. 4

Study

“Eichmann, much less intelligent and without any education to speak of, at least dimly realized that it was not an order but a law which had turned them all into criminals. The distinction between an order and the Führer's word was that the latter's validity was not limited in time and space, which is the outstanding characteristic of the former. This is also the true reason why the Führer's order for the Final Solution was followed by a huge shower of regulations and directives, all drafted by expert lawyers and legal advisors, not by mere administrators; this order, in contrast to ordinary orders, was treated as a law. Needless to add, the resulting legal paraphernalia, far from being a mere symptom of German pedantry and thoroughness, served most effectively to give the whole business its outward appearance of legality.And just as the law in civilized countries assumes that the voice of conscience tells everybody, "Thou shalt not kill," even though man's natural desires and inclinations may at times be murderous, so the law of Hitler's land demanded that the voice of conscience tell everybody: "Thou shalt kill," although the organizers of the massacres knew full well that murder is against the normal desires and inclinations of most people. Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it — the quality of temptation.”

Hannah Arendt book Eichmann in Jerusalem

Source: Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), Ch. VIII.

People, Education, Law, Intelligence

“I felt that everything is beautiful, but [not? ] that which man tries intentionally to make beautiful; that the work of an ordinary bricklayer is more valid than the artwork of all but a very few artists.”

Ellsworth Kelly (1923–2015) American painter, sculptor, and printmaker

Quotes from 'Notes from 1969', Ellsworth Kelly; as quoted in the exhibition catalogue, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, 13 December
1969 - 1980

Beauty

“No statement about God is simply, literally true. God is far more than can be measured, described, defined in ordinary language, or pinned down to any particular happening.”

David Jenkins (bishop)

Quoted in The Guardian ( 24 December 1984 http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/guardian/doc/186552854.html)

God

“An inert historical fact is any fact about a perfectly ordinary arrangement of matter in the world at some point in the past that is no longer discernible, a fact that has left no footprints at all in the world today.”

Daniel Dennett (1942) American philosopher

Source: Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking (2013), p. 69

World, Past

“Many of the greatest masters of the mathematical sciences were first attracted to mathematical inquiry by problems relating to numbers, and no one can glance at the periodicals of the present day which contain questions for solution without noticing how singular a charm such problems still continue to exert. The interest in numbers seems implanted in the human mind, and it is a pity that it should not have freer scope in this country. The methods of the theory of numbers 271 are peculiar to itself, and are not readily acquired by a student whose mind has for years been familiarized with the very different treatment which is appropriate to the theory of continuous magnitude; it is therefore extremely desirable that some portion of the theory should be included in the ordinary course of mathematical instruction at our University. From the moment that Gauss, in his wonderful treatise of 1801, laid down the true lines of the theory, it entered upon a new day, and no one is likely to be able to do useful work in any part of the subject who is unacquainted with the principles and conceptions with which he endowed it.”

James Whitbread Lee Glaisher (1848–1928) English mathematician and astronomer

Source: "Presidential Address British Association for the Advancement of Science," 1890, p. 467 : On the theory of numbers

Mathematics, Question, Problem, Universe

“I set off in yoga seventy years ago when ridicule, rejection, and outright condemnation were the lot of a seeker through yoga even in its native land of India. Indeed If I had become a sadhu, a mendicant holy man, wandering the great trunk roads of British India, begging bowl in hand, I would have met with less derision and won more respect. At one time I was asked to become a sannyasin and renounce the world, but I declined. I wanted to live as an ordinary householder with all the trials and tribulations of life and to take my yoga practice r to average people who share my life with me the common life of work, marriage and children. I was blessed with all three…”

B.K.S. Iyengar (1918–2014) Indian yoga teacher and scholar

Source: Light on Life: The Yoga Journey to Wholeness, Inner Peace, and Ultimate Freedom, P.xiii

Life, Marriage, Children, People

“The typical reaction of liberal intellectuals is to seize on the contradiction here: How can something be both wrong and right, or at least both wrong and OK, at the same time? What liberal intellectuals fail to see is that this so-called contradiction expresses the quintessence of the Machiavellian and therefore the modern, a quintessence that has been thoroughly absorbed by the man in the street. The world is ruled by necessity, says the man in the street, not by some abstract moral code. We have to do what we have to do.
If you wish to counter the man in the street, it cannot be by appeal to moral principles, much less by demanding that people should run their lives in such a way that there are no contradictions between what they say and what they do. Ordinary life is full of contradictions; ordinary people are used to accommodating them. Rather, you must attack the metaphysical, supra-empirical status of necessità and show that to be fraudulent.”

J.M. Coetzee book Diary of a Bad Year

Source: Diary of a Bad Year (2007), p. 17

Life, People, World, Way

“An ambiguity, in ordinary speech, means something very pronounced, and as a rule witty or deceitful…. any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language.”

William Empson book Seven Types of Ambiguity

From the Preface
Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930)

“Our common actions in reality are simply the sackcloth covering which hides the cloth-of-gold - the meaning of the pattern. For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential—the imagination.”

Lawrence Durrell The Alexandria Quartet

The Alexandria Quartet (1957–1960), Justine (1957)

Life, People, Art, Way

“Ordinary language is not the last word: in principle it can everywhere be supplemented and improved upon and superseded. Only remember, it is the first word.”

J. L. Austin (1911–1960) English philosopher

Source: Philosophical Papers (1979), p. 185.

“I would dramatically reduce the safeguards for software — from the ordinary term of 95 years to an initial term of 5 years, renewable once. And I would extend that government-backed protection only if the author submitted a duplicate of the source code to be held in escrow while the work was protected. Once the copyright expired, that escrowed version would be publicly available from the copyright office.
Most programmers should like this change. No code lives for 10 years, and getting access to the source code of even orphaned software projects would benefit all. More important, it would unlock the knowledge built into this protected code for others to build upon as they see fit. Software would thus be like every other creative work — open for others to see and to learn from.”

Lawrence Lessig (1961) American academic, political activist.

May the Source Be With You (2001)

Knowledge, Learning, Change

“To tell the indigenous inhabitants of Brixton or Southall or Leicester or Bradford or Birmingham or Wolverhampton, to tell the pensioners ending their days in streets of nightly terror unrecognisable as their former neighbourhoods, to tell the people of towns and cities where whole districts have been transformed into enclaves of foreign lands, that "the man with a coloured face could be an enrichment to my life and that of my neighbours" is to drive them beyond the limits of endurance. It is not so much that it is obvious twaddle. It is that it makes cruel mockery of the experience and fears of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of ordinary, decent men and women…In understanding this matter, the beginning of wisdom is to grasp the law that in human societies power is never left unclaimed and unused. It does not blow about, like wastepaper on the streets, ownerless and inert. Men's nature is not only, as Thucydides long ago asserted, to exert power where they have it: men cannot help themselves from exerting power where they have it, whether they want to or not…It is the business of the leaders of distinct and separate populations to see that the power which they possess is used to benefit those for whom they speak. Leaders who fail to do so, or to do so fast enough, find themselves outflanked and superseded by those who are less squeamish. The Gresham's Law of extremism, that the more extreme drives out the less extreme, is one of the basic rules of political mechanics which operate in this field: it is a corollary of the general principle that no political power exist without being used. Both the general law and its Gresham's corollary point, in contemporary circumstances, towards the resort to physical violence, in the form of firearms or high explosive, as being so probable as to be predicted with virtual certainty. The experience of the last decade and more, all round the world, shows that acts of violence, however apparently irrational or inappropriate their targets, precipitate a frenzied search on the part of the society attacked to discover and remedy more and more grievances, real or imaginary, among those from whom the violence is supposed to emanate or on whose behalf it is supposed to be exercised. Those commanding a position of political leverage would then be superhuman if they could refrain from pointing to the acts of terrorism and, while condemning them, declaring that further and faster concessions and grants of privilege are the only means to avoid such acts being repeated on a rising scale. This is what produces the gearing effect of terrorism in the contemporary world, yielding huge results from acts of violence perpetrated by minimal numbers. It is not, I repeat again and again, that the mass of a particular population are violently or criminally disposed. Far from it; that population soon becomes itself the prisoner of the violence and machinations of an infinitely small minority among it. Just a few thugs, a few shots, a few bombs at the right place and time – and that is enough for disproportionate consequences to follow.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Speech to the Stretford Young Conservatives (21 January 1977), from A Nation or No Nation? Six Years in British Politics (Elliot Right Way Books, 1977), pp. 168-171
1970s

Life, Wisdom, Women, Men

“Behind every political deal in this country, the first casualties are always the ordinary people, who are barely treated as human.”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

2000-09, Our Duty Is to Remember Sichuan, 2009

People, Country

“Human sense organs can receive only news of difference, and the differences must be coded into events in time (i. e., into changes) in order to be perceptible. Ordinary static differences that remain constant for more than a few seconds become perceptible, only by scanning. Similarly, very slow changes become perceptible only by a combination of scanning and bringing together observations from separated moments in the continuum of time.”

Gregory Bateson (1904–1980) English anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician and cyberneticist

Source: Mind and Nature, a necessary unity, 1988, p. 74-75

Sense, Change, Time

“The only progress I can see is progress in organization. The ordinary human being does not live long enough to draw any substantial benefit from his own experience. And no one, it seems, can benefit by the experiences of others. Being both a father and teacher, I know we can teach our children nothing. We can transmit to them neither our knowledge of life nor of mathematics. Each must learn its lesson anew.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

1920s, Viereck interview (1929)

Life, Children, Mathematics, Knowledge

“Isn’t it typical? We train one man—one ordinary, inoffensive, retiring little man—to be an efficient killing machine and he kills the one person who stood a chance of saving us from ourselves!”

John Brunner book Stand on Zanzibar

continuity (42) “And Say Which Seed Will Grow“
Stand on Zanzibar (1968)

Chance, Personality, Training

“Frantic administration of panaceas to the world is certainly discouraged by the reflection that "this present" might be "the world's last night"; sober work for the future, within the limits of ordinary morality and prudence, is not.”

Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963) Christian apologist, novelist, and Medievalist

The World's Last Night (1952)

World, Future, Night

“Method is not less requisite in ordinary conversation than in writing, provided a man would talk to make himself understood.”

Joseph Addison (1672–1719) politician, writer and playwright

No. 476 (5 September 1712).
The Spectator (1711–1714)

“Those who died in the attack were not simply humans: they were Americans; and not ordinary Americans, either, but the priests and priestesses of the supreme God of this age: the Dollar. The passengers of the domestic flights are not a valid sample of humanity either, but a wealthy, busy, environmentally damaging and world-devouring portion of mankind.”

Pentti Linkola (1932) Finnish ecologist

Can Life Prevail?: A Revolutionary Approach to the Environmental Crisis. page 158

God, Age, World, Business

“In reality, the likelihood of reaching the pinnacle of capitalist society today is only marginally better than were the chances of being accepted into the French nobility four centuries ago, though at least an aristocratic age was franker, and therefore kinder, about the odds. It did not relentlessly play up the possibilities open to all, … and so, in turn, did not cruelly equate an ordinary life with a failed one.”

Alain de Botton (1969) Swiss writer

Source: The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (2009), p. 278.

Life, Age, Reality, Chance

“I think the verdict that has been given against me is a proof that I am more than ordinary myself, but that the circumstances and the help that is given is more than ordinary, are more than ordinary, and although I consider myself only as others, yet by the will of God, by his Providence, by the circumstances which have surrounded me for fifteen years, I think that I have been called to do something which at least in the North-West nobody has done yet, and in some way I think that to a certain number of people the verdict against me to day is a proof that maybe I am a prophet, maybe Riel is a prophet. He suffers for it.”

Louis Riel (1844–1885) Canadian politician

Address on sentencing (1885)

God, People, Way, Thinking

“Christ's miracles were vivid manifestations to the senses that He is the Saviour of the body — and now as then the issues of life and death are in His hands — that our daily existence is a perpetual miracle. The extraordinary was simply a manifestation of God's power in the ordinary.”

Frederick William Robertson (1816–1853) British writer and theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 65.

Life, Death, God, Sense

“It is said that young men of genius come to London with great poems and dramas in their pockets and find every door closed against them. Chatterton's death perpetuated this legend. But when I, George Moore, came to London in search of literary adventure, I found a ready welcome. Possibly I should not have been accorded any welcome had I been anything but an ordinary person.”

George Moore (novelist) (1852–1933) Irish novelist, short-story writer, poet, art critic, memoirist and dramatist

Source: Confessions of a Young Man http://www.gutenberg.org/files/12278/12278-h/12278-h.htm (1886), Ch. 12.

Death, Men, Search, Personality

“The powers of the legislature are defined, and limited; and that those limits may not be mistaken, or forgotten, the constitution is written. To what purpose are powers limited, and to what purpose is that limitation committed to writing, if these limits may, at any time, be passed by those intended to be restrained? The distinction, between a government with limited and unlimited powers, is abolished, if those limits do not confine the persons on whom they are imposed, and if acts prohibited and acts allowed, are of equal obligation. It is a proposition too plain to be contested, that the constitution controls any legislative act repugnant to it; or, that the legislature may alter the constitution by an ordinary act.”

John Marshall (1755–1835) fourth Chief Justice of the United States

5. U.S. (1 Cranch) 137, 177
Marbury v. Madison (1803)

Time, Personality

“This death’s livery which walled its bearers from ordinary life was sign that they have sold their wills and bodies to the State: and contracted themselves into a service not the less abject for that its beginning was voluntary.”

T. E. Lawrence (1888–1935) British archaeologist, military officer, and diplomat

The Revolt in the Desert (1927) Ch. 35

Life, Death

“Suppose any person to be put in possession of a large estate of fruitful land, with rich beds of gold in its gravel; countless herds of cattle in its pastures; houses, and gardens, and storehouses full of useful stores; but suppose, after all, that he could get no servants? In order that he may be able to have servants, some one in his neighbourhood must be poor, and in want of his gold — or his corn. Assume that no one is in want of either, and that no servants are to be had. He must, therefore, bake his own bread, make his own clothes, plough his own ground, and shepherd his own flocks. His gold will be as useful to him as any other yellow pebbles on his estate. His stores must rot, for he cannot consume them. He can eat no more than another man could eat, and wear no more than another man could wear. He must lead a life of severe and common labour to procure even ordinary comforts; he will be ultimately unable to keep either houses in repair, or fields in cultivation; and forced to content himself with a poor man's portion of cottage and garden, in the midst of a desert of waste land, trampled by wild cattle, and encumbered by ruins of palaces, which he will hardly mock at himself by calling "his own."”

John Ruskin book Unto This Last

Essay II: "The Veins of Wealth," section 29.
Unto This Last (1860)

Life, Housing, Personality, Clothes

“Before it can be said, then, that human freedom and the absolute definiteness of God as Supreme Reason are really reconciled, we must have found some way of harmonising the eternity of the human spirit with the creative and regenerative offices of God. The sense of their antagonism is nothing new. Confronted with the race-wide fact of human sin, the elder theology proclaimed this antagonism, and solved it by denying to man any but a temporal being; quite as the common-sense of the everyday Philistine, absorbed in the limitations of the sensory life, proclaims the mere finitude of man, and is stolid to the ideal considerations that suggest immortality and moral freedom, rating them as day-dreams beneath sober notice, because the price of their being real is the attributing to man nothing short of infinity. "We are finite! merely finite!" is the steadfast cry of the old theology and of the plodding common realist alike; and, sad to say, of most of historic philosophy too. And the old theology, with more penetrating consistency than the realistic ordinary man or the ordinary philosophy, went on to complete its vindication of the Divine Sovereignty from all human encroachment by denying the freedom of man altogether.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Harmony of Determinism and Freedom, p.330-1

Life, God, Sadness, Dreams

“With ordinary men the moments which are united in a close continuity out of the original discrete multiplicity are very few, and the course of their lives resembles a little brook, whereas with the genius it is more like a mighty river into which all the little rivulets flow from afar; that is to say, the universal comprehension of genius vibrates to no experience in which all the individual moments have not been gathered up and stored.”

Otto Weininger book Sex and Character

Source: Sex and Character (1903), p. 124.

Men, Universe

“One is forced to assume that ordinary people have the computational capabilities and statistical software of econometricians.”

Gerd Gigerenzer (1947) German psychologist

Gerd Gigerenzer and Reinhard Selten (2001), Bounded Rationality. The Adaptive Toolbox, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

People

“I consider Osama bin Laden as one of the people that I admire. To me, he is in the category of Malcolm X, Che Guevara, Patrice Lumumba, Fidel Castro, all leaders that I admire… [who] had severe dislike for the US government and those who held power in the US. I think all of them felt the US government and its spokesmen were all arrogant, racist, hypocritical, self-righteous, and power hungry….. You asked, 'Should freedom fighters support him?' Freedom fighters all over the world, and not just in the Muslim world, don’t just support him; they revere him; they join him in battle. He is no ordinary leader or an ordinary Muslim.”

Yuri Kochiyama (1921–2014) American activist

Cited in: Janell Ross. " Google commemorates a very controversial civil-rights figure, Yuri Kochiyama https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/05/19/google-commemorates-a-very-controversial-civil-rights-figure-yuri-kochiyama/" at washingtonpost.com, May 19, 2016. <br class="br">"Yuri Kochiyama, On War, Imperialism, Osama bin Laden, And Black-Asian Politic," 2003

People, World, Support, Thinking

Quotes about ordinary page 4

Quotes about ordinary
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