Dean Acheson Quotes

My definition of an educated man is the fellow who knows the right thing to do at the time it has to be done. You can be sincere and still be stupid.

It's a big jump from smart to motherwit.

I actually don't think that I'm that much smarter than anybody else. It's just that I frequently just seem to know what to do, and I think that's wisdom.

Education does not necessarily make one wise?

Owl hasn't exactly got Brain, but he Knows Things.

A lot of clever people have got everything except judgement

Common sense is the genius of humanity.

Wisdom is not wisdom when it is derived from books alone.

Common sense is the measure of the possible; it is composed of experience and prevision; it is calculation applied to life.

The wise are above books.

It is a thousand times better to have common sense without education than to have education without common sense.

There's still the part of me that wants to leap at every opportunity, but now there's the other side that says, 'Let's just wait a minute and see what happens.' That's intuition, and it comes with age and experience.

You don't get old being stupid.

Though I am fascinated by knowledge, I am even more fascinated by wisdom.

No delusion is greater than the notion that method and industry can make up for lack of mother-wit, either in science or in practical life.

Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if he has common sense on the ground-floor. But if a man hasn't got plenty of good common sense, the more science he has, the worse for his patient.

I have confidence in people's basic common sense.

The wise are instructed by reason; ordinary minds by experience; the stupid, by necessity; and brutes by instinct.

I think people got more common sense than people give 'em credit for.

At the end of the day, none of us are the Oracle of Delphi, so we don't get everything right. It's always good to be able to listen and to take on what seems to be the right thing to do.

One thing I have seen over and over again in life is that there is virtually no correlation between intelligence and common sense. IQ doesn't seem to translate that way.

Common sense is often underrated.

Good judgement is the result of experience and experience the result of bad judgement.

Some people have nothing but experience.

Wisdom - meaning judgment acting on experience, common sense, available knowledge, and a decent appreciation of probability.