“I've never had any illusions about being a lead actor in films, because lead actors have to be of a certain kind. Apart from the beauty of looks and figure, which I cannot claim to have, there's just a particular kind of ordinary-Joe quality that a film star needs to have.” NeedsLooksKindFilmCertainActorsStarsQualityFiguresParticularOrdinaryIllusionClaimsFilm Stars Author:Stephen Fry
“Larry Colton’s Ordinary Joes are just like us, yet they endure what we could never imagine, and are ennobled in ways they themselves might not claim. Intimate and epic, unblinking and even-handed, Colton’s engrossing story strips sentimentality and cliché from our notion of hero.” WayStoriesMightImagineHeroOrdinaryClaimsEndureNotionIntimateEpicLarrySentimentality Author:Ron Shelton
“I am not [...] asserting that humans are either genial or aggressive by inborn biological necessity. Obviously, both kindness and violence lie within the bounds of our nature because we perpetrate both, in spades. I only advance a structural claim that social stability rules nearly all the time and must be based on an overwhelmingly predominant (but tragically ignored) frequency of genial acts, and that geniality is therefore our usual and preferred response nearly all the time. [...] [T]he center of human nature is rooted in ten thousand ordinary acts of kindness that define our days.” HumansLyingSocialKindnessViolenceHuman NatureThousandTenOrdinaryClaimsResponseBoundsStabilityAggressiveUsualRootedIgnoredFrequencyActs Of KindnessSpadesGeniality Author:Stephen Jay Gould
“The theory of punctuated equilibrium, proposed by Niles Eldredge and myself, is not, as so often misunderstood, a radical claim for truly sudden change, but a recognition that ordinary processes of speciation, properly conceived as glacially slow by the standard of our own life-span, do not resolve into geological time as long sequences of insensibly graded intermediates (the traditional, or gradualistic, view), but as geologically "sudden" origins at single bedding planes.” LongProcessViewsTheoryStandardsOrdinaryClaimsTraditionalRecognitionRadicalPlanesResolveMisunderstoodSequenceEquilibriumLife SpanSudden ChangeBeddingGeological TimeSpeciation Author:Stephen Jay Gould
“While it is possible for intelligence to increase the range of benevolent impulse, and thus prompt a human being to consider the needs and rights of other than those to whom he is bound by organic and physical relationship, there are definite limits in the capacity of ordinary mortals which makes it impossible for them to grant to others what they claim for themselves.” NeedsHumansHuman BeingsRightsImpossibleLimitsOrdinaryCapacityClaimsIncreaseBoundsMortalsImpulseRangeGrantsDefiniteBenevolentPrompts Book:Reinhold Niebuhr: Major Works on Religion and Politics: (Library of America #263) Source: Reinhold Niebuhr: Major Works on Religion and Politics: (Library of America #263)
“Certainly ordinary language has no claim to be the last word, if there is such a thing. It embodies, indeed, something better thanthe metaphysics of the Stone Age, namely, as was said, the inherited experience and acumen of many generations of men.” IfsMenSaidAgeLastsLanguageGenerationsOrdinaryStonesClaimsPhilosophicalMetaphysicsLast WordsSomething BetterStone AgeAcumen Author:J. L. Austin
“I try to write in a way where you care deeply what the next paragraph will be. I hear the rhythm of prose and that, to me, distinguishes great writing from ordinary writing. By the way, I don't even claim that I'm good. I claim that I value it.” WayWritingTryingCareValuesNextOrdinaryClaimsRhythmProseParagraphGreat Writing Author:Neil deGrasse Tyson
“Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers.” SpeakPoorPartyClassMiddleOrdinaryClaimsDemocraticDemocratHeavyLawyerJournalistMiddle ClassAcademicElitesDemocratic PartyDetachedUpper Middle Class Author:Camille Paglia
“To be ordinary is the greatest virtue - because when you are just ordinary, nothing to claim, of this world or that, the ego disappears. The ego feeds on imbalance, the ego feeds on extremes. The ego lives on the polarities - in the middle it disappears. And in every area, in every direction of life, remember this: just stop in the middle and soon you will find the mind has stopped, the ego has stopped. Nothing to claim, it disappears. And when it disappears you have become virtuous. Now the door is open for the divine. In the middle you meet him; at the extremes you miss.” WorldMindRememberVirtueDoorsMiddleMissingThis WorldDivineEgoOrdinaryAreasClaimsExtremesDisappearVirtuousImbalancePolarity Author:Rajneesh