Giambattista Vico Quotes

The majority is always sane.

I think if you live in a country, basically you share the dominant values of a country although you may disagree on issues all the time.

Intuition is the clear conception of the whole at once.

Genius - to know without having learned; to draw just conclusions from unknown premises; to discern the soul of things.

The American people may not be the best-educated, but they're very wise at heart.

Where an opinion is general, it is usually correct.

I see the great continuities in New Zealand history as being decency and common sense and up until now when we've confronted these things we've been able to talk them through, and I'm sure we will with this issue as well.

I work by instinct. You never hear anything new; when you hear advice that makes sense, it's something you already know.

The instinct of the people is right.

We believe in the common sense of the common people.

I don't think morality can be decided on the private level. I think you need public guidance and public support for a moral consensus. The average person has to know instinctively, without thinking too much about it, how he should raise his children.

A civilization is a social entity that manifests religious, political legal, and customary uniformity over an extended period, and which confers on its members the benefits of socially accumulated knowledge.

The question whether nationalism, patriotism, the love of the homeland, is beneficial either to the individual or to the human race as a whole is open to discussion. It might be a much better world if this instinct were eradicated. On the other hand, it might be worse. The fact is that the instinct exists, and that, far from losing its grip on us, on all of us, it is becoming constantly more intense, more exacting, more all-embracing…. Nationalism as we know it may pass, but for the moment it is more powerful than any other idea or even than any religion.

As humans, we don't know what we should do. We don't have those instincts like God has given animals. We have to see to know where we are going. It is just a natural human emotion to look for people to emulate.

If you don't know things, you know, you just go by your instinct.

Though wisdom is common, yet the many live as if they had a wisdom of their own.

The success of everything depends on intuition, the capacity of seeing things in a way which afterwards proves to be true, even though it cannot be established at the moment, and of grasping the essential fact, discarding the unessential, even though one can give no account of the principles by which this is done.

. . .the larger the crowd, the more probable that that which it praises is folly, and the more improbable that it is truth; and the most improbable of all that it is any eternal truth.

I have great confidence in the common sense of mankind in general.

Everybody always knows something," said Adam, "even if it's something they don't know they know.

How great a quality is horse sense! Someone has defined it as that something which keeps horses from betting on men!

Intuition is like reading a word without having to spell it out. A child can't do that because it has had so little experience. A grown-up person knows the word because they've seen it often before.

If I point to anything that makes me who I am, it's that I have a whole lot of common sense. I've got a good mind and a good ability to read people and situations.

There is no transgression blacker than to do or think alone.

Must one dread what others dread?