It may be expecting too much to expect most intellectuals to have common sense, when their whole life is based on their being uncommon -- that is, saying things that are different from what everyone else is saying. There is only so much genuine originality in anyone. After that, being uncommon means indulging in pointless eccentricities or clever attempts to mock or shock.
Thomas SowellRelated topics
anyone common different everyone expect indulging originality saying sense means thingsRelated quotes
No one will ever be closer to you than your parents. And no one's heart will ache for you as much as a parent's does. Father and Mother are the only ones who care about you more than anything else in the world, the only ones who truly love you. In the world, many things can be found again, but you can't find another Father or another Mother. Parents sacrifice themselves, lighting our path...
Ephraim of Arizona
You see, unfortunately, I am not black. There are lots of different kinds of blood in our family. But here in the United States, the word "Negro” is used to mean anyone who has any Negro blood at all in his veins. In Africa, the word is more pure. It means all Negro, therefore black. I am brown. My father was a darker brown. My mother an olive-yellow.
Langston Hughes
Since I have an aversion to movies in which people say grace at the dinner table (not to the practice but to how movies use it to establish the moral strength of a household), the opening night montage of Sunday-night supper in one home after another in Waxahachie, Texas in 1935 - a whole community saying grace - made me expect the worst.
Pauline Kael
God thus excludes the world; he is only its cause; in no sense is he effect, of himself or anything else. Pantheism (better, "pandeism," for again it is not really the theos that is described) means that God is the integral totality of ordinary cause-effects, and that there, is no super-cause independent of ordinary causes and effects.
Charles Hartshorne
Read as little as possible of literary criticism - such things are either partisan opinions, which have become petrified and meaningless, hardened and empty of life, or else they are just clever word-games, in which one view wins today, and tomorrow the opposite view. Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism.
Rainer Maria Rilke