The situation in the United States is becoming more dire for average ordinary Americans and the last thing we need to do is to spend money on death, destruction and war.
Ordinary people seem not to realize that those who really apply themselves in the right way to philosophy are directly and of their own accord preparing themselves for dying and death.
It's the quality of the ordinary, the straight, the square, that accounts for the great stability and success of our nation. It's a quality to be proud of. But it's a quality that many people seem to have neglected.
My parents were no ordinary people. My mother turned Gandhian, and my father was a staunch communist. They named me after the great saint as a symbol of communal harmony.
I just wanted to be an ordinary, middle-class person. When I was at Cambridge, I made great efforts to lose the last remnants of my Cockney accent.
It seems to me that good novels celebrate the mystery in ordinary life, and summing it all up in psychological terms strips the mystery away.
I only wish that ordinary people had an unlimited capacity for doing harm; then they might have an unlimited power for doing good.
I hesitate to use a pathologizing label, but underneath the so-called narcissistic personality is definitely shame and the paralyzing fear of being ordinary.
I find that very appealing: the blurring of the lines between what's funny and what's tragic. And what's ordinary and what's not - the big things in the small things.
There's this unspoken club where you say to each other: Oh God, if they only knew how ordinary I was, they wouldn't be interested. That includes movie stars and politicians.
All writers are obviously neurotic... For various reasons, writers retreat into an imaginary world because they find ordinary life rather difficult or boring or both.
You come across quite ordinary, nondescript people in daily life, and I don't see why you should be subjected to them on the stage, too.
In general, when you travel, you get into a different reality and are able to more accurately reflect on your ordinary life. Hiking does that for me.
I would not take for granted that my personal life - because I knew better than anybody - that it was just a life. It was surprisingly an ordinary life.
In real life, you just work for the ordinary self, but in the front of audience you become the superself. That's a completely different thing.
Basically, I'm a really bad interviewer. I love meeting celebrities, but then I get a bit bored. Once you meet them you thing, 'really, what an ordinary person'.
I want ordinary people to enjoy a decent standard of living, with ever increasing security, comfort and joy.
The ultimate first date? Something that is completely out of the ordinary - go crazy, because first dates are always a little awkward, so do something a little extreme.
On the ordinary view of each species having been independently created, we gain no scientific explanation.
I decided on the spot that I would be an artist, and I assure you, it was no ordinary artist I had in mind.
The thing you notice here after America is how refreshingly ordinary people look because they haven't had their chin wrapped around the back of their ears.
