Everybody's got a story on their beards. I guess it's just a way of finding common ground with people you otherwise might not know.
A common man, even like myself, I don't know how to pay my taxes.
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
I didn't know anything was wrong with me when I was growing up. I thought everyone went to occupational and speech therapy, I thought these were common things. I thought I was quite normal until I went to school and someone told me it wasn't normal to have a disability.
Why not let the main parties wither? Because I know of no better vehicle than the political party to enable those with common values to come together and reach a position on issues that can then be offered up as a choice of programmes for voters.
I know that when we interact with those we fear and hate, we will find commonality.
Ya know, I always admired Ray Kroc, the man who invented McDonald's. Ray had a vision of the most commonplace thing - a hamburger and fries to go - but to him it was just the greatest thing ever, and he was going to make it the greatest thing ever for everybody else, and he did.
To be immortal is commonplace; except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death; what is divine, terrible, incomprehensible, is to know that one is immortal.
There's no need to let your family know the details of what you throw out or donate. You can leave communal spaces to the end. The first step is to confront your own stuff.
You begin to realize that hypocrisy is not a terrible thing when you see what overt fascism is compared to sort of covert, you know, communal politics which the Congress has never been shy of indulging in.
We have language and they do not. Chimps communicate by embracing, patting, looking - all these things. And they have lots of sounds. But they cannot sit and discuss. They cannot teach about things that are not present, as far as we know.
The speed of communications is wondrous to behold. It is also true that speed can multiply the distribution of information that we know to be untrue.
So often corporate America, business America, are the worst communicators, because all they understand are facts, and they cannot tell a story. They know how to explain their quarterly results, but they don't know how to explain what they mean.
It is often suggested that the A.N.C. is controlled by the Communist Party, by Communists. Well, I have been long enough in the A.N.C. to know that that has never been true.
And also they were absolutely brilliant in one way, you know: they knew how effective is not to punish somebody who is guilty; what Communist Party members could afford to do was mind-boggling: they could do practically anything they wanted - steal, you know, lie, whatever.
When students come to the community college, they're focused. They know what they want to do, and they have a certain amount of time to do it.
Community-based policing has now come to mean everything. It's a slogan. It has come to mean so many different things that people who endorse it, such as the Congress of the United States, do not know what they are talking about.
I now know all the people worth knowing in America, and I find no intellect comparable to my own.
I think all literature should be read as comparative literature. And I think we should write out of what we know, but in the expectation that we can be changed at any moment by something we have yet to discover.
I try to have the right thing happen at the end of the case, try to have the case have a moral compass to it, try to do a little teaching while I'm at it because that's the, you know, that's the preacher in me.
