common sense

Anyone who has had a long life of experiences is worth listening to, worth emulating, and worth tying to as a friend. No one can have too much experience in any line of endeavor. We readily welcome to our group of friends that one who talks with the voice of experience and common sense. We know that we are safe in his hands. He is not going to get us into trouble. Rather is he going to point out the pitfalls and mistakes that experience has taught him to avoid. There is no experience but what carries its lasting good for us along with it. And you don't have to discard experience. It's a coat for life! It never wears out.

The common people of America display a quality of good common sense which is heartening to anyone who believes in the democratic process.

A man of great common sense and good taste, - meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage.

It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.

The well adjusted make poor prophets. A pleasant existence blinds us to the possibilities of drastic change. We cling to what we call our common sense, our practical point of view. Actually, these are names for an all-absorbing familiarity with things as they are. . . . Thus it happens that when the times become unhinged, it is the practical people who are caught unaware . . . still clinging to things that no longer exist.

Most business problems require common sense rather than legal reference. They require good judgment and honesty of purpose rather than reference to the courts.

Mathematics is often erroneously referred to as the science of common sense. Actually, it may transcend common sense and go beyond either imagination or intuition. It has become a very strange and perhaps frightening subject from the ordinary point of view, but anyone who penetrates into it will find a veritable fairyland, a fairyland which is strange, but makes sense, if not common sense.

Citizens have the natural right and the common sense duty to protect themselves, their families, their communities, and their property. . . . guns are the equalizing tools of self-protection, utopian lamentations notwithstanding.

We seldom attribute common sense except to those who agree with us.

The doctrine, as I understand it, consists in maintaining that the language of daily life, with words used in their ordinary meanings, suffices for philosophy, which has no need of technical terms or of changes in the significance of common terms. I find myself totally unable to accept this view. I object to it: 1.Because it is insincere; 2.Because it is capable of excusing ignorance of mathematics, physics and neurology in those who have had only a classical education; 3.Because it is advanced by some in a tone of unctuous rectitude, as if opposition to it were a sin against democracy; 4.Because it makes philosophy trivial; 5.Because it makes almost inevitable the perpetuation amongst philosophers of the muddle-headedness they have taken over from common sense.