I was in the Commons recently and saw a young lady wearing a nice pair of shoes. I said I liked them and she said my shoes were the reason she became involved in politics.

Community organizing is all about building grassroots support. It's about identifying the people around you with whom you can create a common passionate cause. And it's about ignoring the conventional wisdom of company politics and instead playing the game by very different rules.

I like to see myself as a bridge builder that is me building bridges between people between races between cultures between politics trying to find common ground.

Politics isn't just a game of clashing parties and competing interests. The right reason is to challenge the status quo to serve the common good and to leave this nation better than we found it.

Politics as the word is commonly understood are nothing but corruptions.

When we are sick we want an uncommon doctor when we have a construction job to do we want an uncommon engineer and when we are at war we want an uncommon general. It is only when we get into politics that we are satisfied with the common man.

Freedom is poetry taking liberties with words breaking the rules of normal speech violating common sense. Freedom is violence.

I used to joke that if acting didn't work out poetry was my commonsense fallback.

Poetry is a mixture of common sense which not all have with an uncommon sense which very few have.

The poetry and transgression that was so much of surrealism's anarchic force has been recruited into mainstream culture. It has been made commonplace by television and magazine merchandising by computer games and Internet visuals by film and MTV by the fashion shoot.

I think that's what poetry does. It allows people to come together and identify with a common thing that is outside of themselves but which they identify with from the interior.

It is not uncommon in modern times to see governments straining every nerve to keep the peace and the people whom they represent with patriotic enthusiasm and resentment over real or fancied wrongs urging them forward to war.

Peace is a never ending process... It cannot ignore our differences or overlook our common interests. It requires us to work and live together.

A nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and by common hatred of its neighbours.

Meekness: Uncommon patience in planning a revenge that is worth while.

We must return optimism to our parenting. To focus on the joys not the hassles the love not the disappointments the common sense not the complexities.

Our observation of nature must be diligent our reflection profound and our experiments exact. We rarely see these three means combined and for this reason creative geniuses are not common.

Nature is commonplace. Imitation is more interesting.

My life so common it disappears and sometimes even music cannot substitute for tears.

I find Indian music very funky. I mean it's very soulful with their own kind of blues. But it's the only other school on the planet that develops improvisation to the high degree that you find in jazz music. So we have a lot of common ground.

Editing is now the easiest thing on earth to do and all the things that evolved out of word processing - 'Oh let's put that sentence there let's get rid of this' - have become commonplace in films and music too.

I'll work with a director if I think I'm going to get into a comfortable situation and if it's someone I respect and who respects me even if they're not so well known. Movies are hard to make and you have to work toward a common ethic and do your best.

If military movies were automatically successful we'd make nothing but military movies. But seriously patriotism is one thing that all Americans have in common.

Language is like money without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt but cannot be reduced to a common denominator.