Ha-Joon Chang Quotes

We try more to profit from always remembering the obvious than from grasping the esoteric.

If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed.

Common sense is better than genius, and hence its bestowment is more universal.

Common sense is seeing things as they are; and doing things as they ought to be.

Fine sense and exalted sense are not half so useful as common sense.

There are people who are so full of common sense that they haven't the slightest cranny left for their own sense.

The essence of the expert is that his field shall be very special and narrow: one of the ways in which he inspires confidence is to rigidly limit himself to the little toe; he would scarcely venture an off-the-record opinion on an infected little finger.

Common sense is so very simple but very difficult to grasp.

There are many different ways to look at a situation, and it's important to look at things the way they are.

I want nevertheless to add that for me the world is a defiance of common sense.

Magicians and scientists are, on the face of it, poles apart. Certainly, a group of people who often dress strangely, live in a world of their own, speak a specialized language and frequently make statements that appear to be in flagrant breach of common sense have nothing in common with a group of people who often dress strangely, speak a specialized language, live in ... er.

Common sense does not ask an impossible chessboard, but takes the one before it and plays the game.

I have been waiting twenty years for someone to say to me: "You have to fight fire with fire" so that I could reply, "That's funny-I always use water."

Common sense is not too common.

It is easier to argue that something nobody believes in actually exists than it is to argue that something everybody believes in is unreal.

It's not the '80s any more. We're not all riding around in limousines and snorting coke off of hookers' tits. We still have to keep working and touring. We're definitely still very much a working band. If we stopped doing this tomorrow, we'd have a little bit of cash to last us a couple of months, and then we'd have to go and get other jobs.

A rock is harder than a feather, you can talk and jabber and make exceptions, but in the end, if you have to choose which one is gonna hit you on the head, you'll choose the feather every single time.

You can't view inflation as a perception issue. Price rise should be seen as a reality. What is available for a consumer should be seen for what it is. There should never be an attempt to view price rise as a perception issue as a means of escaping the reality of price rise.

Common-sense knowledge is prompt, categorical, and inexact.

I'm concerned with the world economy, I'm a specialist in forecasting in that area, and I have a lot of influence in that area, naturally. How big it is, or how big it is personally, is not relevant. The fact is, I'm on the case, where other people are not, and more and more people realize, again and again, that I'm on the case!

Composers aren't daring enough. They're afraid of that sacred idol called 'common sense', which is the most dreadful thing I know - after all, it's no more than a religion founded to excuse the ubiquity of imbeciles!

A novelist must preserve a childlike belief in the importance of things which common sense considers of no great consequence.

Lunches don't get free just because you don't see the prices on the menu. And economists don't get popular by reminding people of that.

It's actually a tribute to the quality of economics teaching that they have persuaded so many generations of students to believe in so much that seems so counter to what the world is like. Many of the things that I'm going to describe make so much more common sense than these notions that seem counter to what one's eyes see every day.

Economists are people who wonder if what works in reality can also work in theory.