“Descartes once joked about common sense that it must be universal, because he had yet to meet anyone who didn’t claim to have it.”

Michael Potemra in National Review Jan. 27, 2003 (I believe he was referring to the opening line of Discours de la Méthode: “Le bon sens est la chose du monde la mieux partagée: car chacun pense en être si bien pourvu que ceux même qui sont les plus difficiles à contenter en toute autre chose n’ont point coutume d’en désirer plus qu’ils en ont.”)

“Respond intelligently even to unintelligent treatment.”

Lao-Tsu in the “Tao Teh King” [sic] quoted in Anthony Robbins Unlimited Power

“Fine sense and exalted sense are not half so useful as common sense. There are 40 men of wit for one of sense; and he that will carry nothing about him but gold, will be every day at a loss for want of readier change.”

Alexander Pope, quoted in Globe & Mail January 29, 1997

“Empty heads have long tongues.”

Bruce Lee, Striking Thoughts

“Common sense, that extinct branch of psychology.”

G.K. Chesterton “The Unpsychological Age” in Alvaro De Silva ed., Brave New Family

“It is the curse of our epoch that the educated are uneducated, especially in the study of history – which is only the study of humanity. Their ignorance is less logical than the ignorance of the Dark Ages, because those ages filled the place of history with legends, which at least professed to deal with the first things, while we only fill it with news, which can only deal with the latest.”

G. K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News March 22, 1919, quoted in Gilbert Magazine April-May 2009

“we [should] form the term catallaxy to describe the object of the science we generally call economics, which then, following Whately, itself ought to be called catallactics… I am convinced that its more general adoption might really contribute to the clarity of our discussion.”

Friedrich Hayek The Fatal Conceit [Whately is Church of Ireland Archbishop Richard Whately, who evidently made the suggestion in 1838]