Common Knowledge Quotes

Conventional wisdom

Thus, the task is not so much to see what no one yet has seen, but to think what nobody yet has thought about that which everybody sees.

The habit of an opinion often leads to the complete conviction of its truth, it hides the weaker parts of it, and makes us incapable of accepting the proofs against it.

Fifty years from now, if an understanding of man's origins, his evolution, his history, his progress is not in the common place of the school books, we shall not exist.

Well, I try not to think about the general public since I have no idea what the general public is and I don't think anybody does.

One of my own guiding principles in intelligence work was ... not to make a mystery of what is a matter of common knowledge or obvious to friend and foe alike.

Nothing has so exposed men of learning to contempt and ridicule as their ignorance of things which are known to all but themselves. Those who have been taught to consider the institutions of the schools as giving the last perfection to human abilities are surprised to see men wrinkled with study, yet wanting to be instructed in the minute circumstances of propriety, or the necessary form of daily transaction; and quickly shake off their reverence for modes of education which they find to produce no ability above the rest of mankind.

I don't believe that you have to be a cow to know what milk is.

It is this simplicity that makes the uneducated more effective than the educated when addressing popular audiences-makes them, as the poets tell us, 'charm the crowd's ears more finely.' Educated men lay down broad general principles; uneducated men argue from common knowledge and draw obvious conclusions.

Love, yes. Word known to all men.

The Beatles were something everyone had in common; this was thirty years ago, there was Dr. Who and everybody knew who the Daleks were and there was The Beatles and everybody knew who George Harrison was.

Common sense is not a simple thing. Instead, it is an immense society of hard-earned practical ideas - of multitudes of life-learned rules and exceptions, dispositions and tendencies, balances and checks.

The wise make proverbs, and fools repeat them.

There is torture of mind as well as body; the will is as much affected by fear as by force. And there comes a point where this Court should not be ignorant as judges of what we know as men.

… knowing as the man in the street always does

There's a lot of common sense ... which I feel like we have lost touch with.

Occasionally, there are programmes - like 'The Office' or 'Gavin and Stacey,' perhaps - where you get the feeling everybody's seen it.

There are no black women geniuses that are being named in canons. I could name a bunch, but it's not part of common knowledge. It's not how the world is taught to think about black women.

It is common knowledge that smoking is considered one of the nation's leading causes of preventable death, but it's less widely known that cigarettes are also the leading cause of fatal fires.

Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.

I hear it all the time in the street: 'It's the crisp bloke.'

There's an element of truth in every idea that lasts long enough to be corny.

Truths that startled the generation in which they were first announced become in the next age the commonplaces of conversation; as the famous airs of operas which thrilled the first audiences come to be played on hand-organs in the streets.

A cliche is everything you've ever heard of.

Just because a lot of people know something nominal doesn't make it important. A lot of people know what a pencil sharpener is, but that doesn't make it the most important invention of the 20th century.