Ordinary

Famous quotes containing the word ordinary:

    Europe has a set of primary interests, which to us have none, or a very remote relation. Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies, the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns. Hence, therefore, it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves, by artificial ties, in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities.
    George Washington (1732–1799)

    The ordinary literary man, even though he be an eminent historian, is ill-fitted to be a mentor in affairs of government. For ... things are for the most part very simple in books, and in practical life very complex.
    Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)

    The trouble is that the expression ‘material thing’ is functioning already, from the very beginning, simply as a foil for ‘sense-datum’; it is not here given, and is never given, any other role to play, and apart from this consideration it would surely never have occurred to anybody to try to represent as some single kind of things the things which the ordinary man says that he ‘perceives.’
    —J.L. (John Langshaw)