I think, increasingly, despite what we are being told is an ever more open world of communication, there is a terrible alienation in the ordinary man between what he is being told and what he secretly believes.
In our ordinary experiences with other people, we know that approaching each other in a machinelike way gets us into trouble.
I’m not that big a celebrity. I’m just an ordinary person.
Empire in the past was always a far harsher and much more accident-prone business than conventional history books imply. And the costs of these overseas invasions were borne not just by those on the receiving end but – frequently – by ordinary, vulnerable people among or associated with the invaders.
I love hearing other people’s stories, and I freely admit I’m scavenging for material through their conversations, but really, at the same time, I’m living an ordinary life.
I just see myself as just an ordinary chick from Florida, not some beautiful woman.
When Ke$ha tries to rap like L’Trimm, she sounds like any ordinary lonely teenage girl stuck in a nowhere town, singing along to her radio and dreaming of a party where she’s the star. Ke$ha’s greatness is that in her voice, you can hear both the loser girl and the star. All hail the Queen of Noi$e!
My dreams were always small and puny. All I ever needed was a little house with a little picket fence by the sea. Little did I know that I would live in Malacanang Palace for 20 years and visit all the major palaces of mankind. And then also meet ordinary citizens and the leaders of superpowers.
Across the nation, the election protection movement attracts ordinary citizens who educate their neighbors about their voting systems and the private companies that built and run them.
Great men lose somewhat of their greatness by being near us; ordinary men gain much.
In interviews with dozens of black advisers, friends, donors and allies, few said they had ever heard Mr. Obama muse on the experience of being the first black president of the United States, a role in which every day he renders what was once extraordinary almost ordinary.
I consider myself an ordinary Muslim who is constantly working to put himself in the framework established by the Koran and the tradition of the Prophet Mohammed. I study the works of experts of jurisprudence, Koranic commentary, hadith commentary, and Sufism.
Sanctification is not to be understood here as a separation from ordinary use or consecration to some special use, although this meaning is often present in Scripture, sometimes referring to outward and sometimes to inward or effectual separation.
I have no sympathy for debunking human achievements that, in the end, gave ordinary people liberty.
The bronze dwarfs give you the first clue that Wroclaw is no ordinary city. They lurk all over the place, carousing outside pubs, snoring at the doors of hotels, peeking out from behind the bars of the old city jail.
Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.
We wish to be treated ‘not as ordinary prisoners,’ for we are not criminals. We admit no crime – unless, that is, the love of one’s people and country is a crime.
Greatness comes by doing a few small and smart things each and every day. Comes from taking little steps, consistently. Comes from a making a few small chips against everything in your professional and personal life that is ordinary, so that a day eventually arrives when all that’s left is The Extraordinary.
I think what I like to do is to begin with the ordinary and find the extraordinary in it.
I always thought that one day I would be somebody. I would be successful in music, and I would have fans that cared about my music. At the same time, I really feel like an ordinary guy; I have been an ordinary guy forever.
Few contemporary artists mined the space between the ordinary and the strange better than Orozco did.
I am saying that while popular culture usually portrays practitioners of magic as separate from ordinary people, often biologically different, many people have habits or customs or superstitions that show magic was once a whole lot more democratic.
Small minds are concerned with the extraordinary, great minds with the ordinary.
There’s another way of making music, by touching the lives and feelings of ordinary people.
Speech was given to the ordinary sort or men, whereby to communicate their mind; but to wise men, whereby to conceal it.
In the ordinary affairs of life we do not require nor expect demonstrative evidence, because it is inconsistent with the nature of matters of fact, and to insist on its production would be unreasonable and absurd.
I was an ordinary student at school and, at the same time, an actor. But I was not the popular kid, which helped me to play Peter Parker better.
I put ordinary people in jeopardy and give them the opportunity to be heroic. Then there’s a great payoff for the reader at the end, when the heroic character gets what he or she deserves. Readers will come back again and again if they feel satisfied at the end.
I hate being called spoilt. My life is ordinary.
If you are at the top in entertainment, you earn money that you can never justify to ordinary people doing proper jobs. You can’t.
My story is similar to every ordinary Indian boy’s tale. My father wanted me to become an engineer or a professional but I was sure that I have to be in the Hindi film industry. I joined college through the quota for extra curricular activities but I am still not a graduate.
When two people first meet, they can only have a very ordinary kind of friendship. But when you begin to understand each other, when you get close to them, you discover that you’re suddenly eager to know him or her even better.
David Simon is a brilliant writer, brilliant at being able to take what is ordinary and make it extraordinary.
I have always thought music as a way out of the ordinary mundane obligations of life.
By bringing the voices of the ordinary people faced with extraordinary challenges to television screens around the world, I hope to affect change in one community at a time.
Those who claim to be in the know say Baros is nothing out of the ordinary as Maldivian islands go – that Reethi Ra is far more fashionable, Soneva Fushi more eco-compliant. Truth to tell, they all look pretty much alike from a distance.
There never has been a war yet which, if the facts had been put calmly before the ordinary folk, could not have been prevented. The common man, I think, is the great protection against war.
You have to give kids from ordinary families a ladder. You have to show them there’s a way out.
Poems have a different music from ordinary language, and every poem has a different kind of music of necessity, and that’s, in a way, the hardest thing about writing poetry is waiting for that music, and sometimes you never know if it’s going to come.
On sand, you can never be sure of anything. An ordinary shot can take a wicked deflection at the last moment.
If the attainment of peace is the ultimate objective of all statesmen, it is, at the same time, something very ordinary, closely tied to the daily life of each individual.
I don’t think that my films are ‘literary’; they are based on the most ordinary things of life.
There are certain things that ordinary people have that celebrities don’t have.
Excellence is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well.
Rap isn’t that time-consuming for me, compared to an ordinary artist. I do not stay in the studio all day.
I just wanted to be an ordinary parish priest.
I hesitate to use a pathologizing label, but underneath the so-called narcissistic personality is definitely shame and the paralyzing fear of being ordinary.
‘What I would give,’ I thought, ‘to have been present as Elizabeth Keckley measured Mary Lincoln for a new gown, to overhear their conversations on topics significant and ordinary, to observe the Lincoln White House from such an intimate perspective.’
I named my album ‘So Uncool’ because it defies the ordinary: you’re different from everyone else. It’s like, being uncool makes you cool because you’re different!
I adopt a very simple approach. I observe and reflect real life and ordinary people and sooner or later that raises a laugh.
I am particularly looking forward to meeting ordinary American people and hearing about their extraordinary lives.
Have you not learned that strength comes to an ordinary soul when given an extraordinary calling?
I certainly think it’s very important that writers as citizens – not necessarily as writers, but just as ordinary citizens – should talk about things that matter to them.
The queue of activists, interest groups, and ordinary people wringing their hands over what a President Donald Trump might do in office is long, and environmentalists are at the front of the line.
It is Cameron’s cabinet of millionaires who are the real spongers given free rein to live out their Thatcherite fantasies at the expense of ordinary, decent communities throughout these islands.
After I returned from Oxford, I spent 5-6 years in a village in Madhya Pradesh – 25 km. outside Bhopal – along with a group of people working with the communities. But, over time, we realised that there were just too many constraints, and for ordinary citizens to be the change agent was not that easy.
