Robert G. Ingersoll Quotes

It's called common sense, but it's not common. Most people don't have it.

Why is it that common sense is seldom common practice?

The past. The Golden Age of the past. What a nostalgia we all feel for it. Yet we don't want it when we get it. Try the South Seas.

Who besides guys like me are part of the reality-based community?

Much learning does not teach sense.

Ability to type on a computer terminal is no guarantee of sanity, intelligence, or common sense.

The truth is, that common-sense, or thought as it first emerges above the level of the narrowly practical, is deeply imbued with that bad logical quality to which the epithet metaphysical is commonly applied; and nothing can clear it up but a severe course of logic.

Common sense (which, in truth, is very uncommon) is the best sense I know of: abide by it; it will counsel you best.

To glorify the past and paint the future is easy, to survey the present and emerge with some light and understanding is difficult.

If it doesn't make sense, it's usually not true.

You must learn to know the difference between tales and the truth, my Liza, she would say. Fairy tales have a habit of ending too soon. They never show what happens afterwards when the prince and princess ride off the page.

There is absolutely no common sense, it is common non-sense.

Noise ain't Truth, Noise is what men want to be true, and there's a difference twixt those two things so big that it could ruddy well kill you if you don't watch out.

It is the considered opinion of most members of our rational élites that, in any given difference of opinion with reality, reality is wrong.

To avoid the various foolish opinions to which mankind are prone, no superhuman genius is required. A few simple rules will keep you, not from all error, but from silly error.

Show Holmes a drop of water and he would deduce the existence of the Atlantic. Show it to me and I would look for a tap. That was the difference between us.

Whenever you find yourself getting angry about a difference of opinion, be on your guard; you will probably find, on examination, that your belief is going beyond what the evidence warrants.

Science when well-digested is nothing but good sense and reason.

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.

Invention requires both disciplines, strict common sense and wild imagination.

The more reasonable a student was in mathematics, the more unreasonable she was in the affairs of real life, concerning which fewtrustworthy postulates have yet been ascertained.

Blasphemy is an epithet bestowed by superstition upon common sense.

Common sense, alas in spite of our educational institutions, is a rare commodity.

No Ghost of any common sense begins a conversation

We know you have a great mind and all, Mother, but you don’t have much sense.