The fine wine leaves you with something pleasant; the ordinary wine just leaves.

-Amerine, Maynard Andrew
Quoted in Clifton Fadiman The New Joy of Wine (1990).

I count our progress by the extent to which what we cried in the wilderness five and thirty years ago has now become part of the assumptions of the ordinary man and woman† It is better to argue from what has been done to what may be done, rather than to suggest that very little has been accomplished.

-1st Earl
  Of the Labour Party. Letter to Harold J Laski,1 May.

Jane Austen is the only novelist I know whose peculiar genius lies in taking perfectly ordinary people through ordinary situations, and transmogrifying them into fascinating fiction.

-Banks, Lynne Reid
  In her entry in Contemporary Novelists, 5th edn.

  The chief thing, my dear fellows, is to play it simply, without any theatricality: just very simply. Remember that they are all ordinary people.

-Chekhov, Anton
  Attributedadvice to actors, during arehearsalof TheSeagull.

   All people seem to be divided into'ordinary'and 'extraordinary'. The ordinary people must lead a life of strict obedience and have no right to transgress the law because†theyare ordinary.Whereas the extraordinary people have the right to commit any crime they like and transgress the law in any way just because they happen to be extraordinary.

-Dostoevsky, Fyodor Mikhailovich
  Crime and Punishment, pt.3, ch.5 (translated by David Magarshak).

The real accomplishment of modern science and technology consists in taking ordinary men, informing them narrowlyand deeply and then, through appropriate organization, arranging to have their knowledge combined with that of other specialized but equally ordinary men. This dispenses with the need for genius.Theresulting performance, though lessinspiring, is far more predictable.

-Galbraith,John Kenneth
  The New Industrial State.

Sociology is a new science concerning itself not with esoteric matters outside the comprehension of the layman, as the older sciences do, but with the ordinary affairs of ordinary people. This seems to engender in those who write about it a feeling that the lack of anyabstruseness in their subject matter demands a compensatoryabstruseness in their language. 365

-Gowers, Sir Ernest Arthur
  'Sociologese', in H F Fowler A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (2nd rev edn).

   One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.

-Hubbard, Elbert Green
Thousand and One Epigrams.

If Margaret Thatcher wins onThursday, I warn you not to be ordinary,I warnyou not to be young,I warnyou not to fall ill, I warn you not to get old.

-Kinnock, Neil Gordon
  Speech one day before polling,  Jun.

Denn dem Menschen ist amWiedererkennen gelegen; er m o« chte das Alte im Neuen wiederfinden und das Typische im Individuellen. For man always searches for recognition: he would like to find the old in the new and the ordinary in the individual.

-Mann,Thomas
  Freud und die Zukunft.

There are no ordinary moments.

-Millman, Dan
  The Way of the Peaceful Warrior.

   Ordinary life bypassed me, but I also bypassed it. It couldn't have been any other way.Conventional life and conventional people are not for me.

-O'Brien, Edna
In  Annalena Mc Afee (ed) Lives and Works: Profiles of Leading Novelists, Poets and Playwrights (2002).

Most artists try to break your heart, or they accidentally break their own hearts.But I find the quietness in the ordinary much more satisfying.

-Rauschenberg, Robert
  In the NewYorkTimes,15 Feb.