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Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.
No race of kings has ever presented above one man of common sense in twenty generations.
THOMAS JEFFERSON, letter to Benjamin Hawkins, Aug. 4, 1787
Common sense is not so common.
VOLTAIRE, Dictionnaire Philosophique
Common-sense is part of the home-made ideology of those who have been deprived of fundamental learning, of those who have been kept ignorant.
JOHN BERGER, A Fortunate Man
Common sense is judgment without reflection, shared by an entire class, an entire nation, or the entire human race.
GIAMBATTISTA VICO, The New Science
Common sense always speaks too late. Common sense is the guy who tells you you ought to have had your brakes relined last week before you smashed a front end this week. Common sense is the Monday morning quarterback who could have won the ball game if he had been on the team. But he never is. He's high up in the stands with a flask on his hip. Common sense is the little man in a gray suit who never makes a mistake in addition. But it's always somebody's else's money he's adding up.
RAYMOND CHANDLER, Playback
Common sense is the best distributed thing in the world, for we all think we possess a good share of it.
RENÉ DESCARTES, Discours de la Méthode
Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.
ALBERT EINSTEIN, as quoted in Jerry Mayer's Bite-Size Einstein
If common sense were as unerring as calculus, as some suggest, I don't understand why so many mistakes are made so often by so many people.
CARY WINKEL, as quoted in Explaining One's Self to Others: Reason-Giving in a Social Context
Common-sense appears to be only another name for the thoughtlessness of the unthinking. It is made of the prejudices of childhood, the idiosyncrasies of individual character and the opinion of the newspapers.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM, A Writer's Notebook
When common sense sees a puzzling phenomenon it looks for a causal agent. When it sees organization it looks for an organizer. This works amazingly well for purposes ranging from the diagnosis of diseases to the creation of governments. But it cannot account for emergence ... the appearance of complex phenomena not predictable from the basic elements and processes alone.
CARL BEREITER, Education and Mind in the Knowledge Age
Common sense is better than genius, and hence its bestowment is more universal.
The best prophet is common sense.
EURIPIDES, as quoted in Explaining One's Self to Others: Reason-Giving in a Social Context
Common sense is the foundation of all authorities, of the laws themselves, and of their construction.
THOMAS JEFFERSON, Batture Case, 1812
Whenever a man boasts much about [his common sense], you may be pretty sure that he has very little sense, either common or uncommon.
HENRY THOMAS BUCKLE, Essays
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