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orthodoxy is a fixed habit of mind. The average man and woman hug their orthodoxies and spit their venom on those that outrage them.
Sep 10, 2025
The fact is that liberty, in any true sense, is a concept that lies quite beyond the reach of the inferior man's mind. And no wonder, for genuine liberty demands of its votaries a quality he lacks completely, and that is courage. The man who loves it must be willing to fight for it; blood, said Jefferson, is its natural manure. Liberty means self-reliance, it means resolution, it means the capacity for doing without . . . the average man doesn't want to be free. He wants to be safe.
It's not the genius who is 100 years ahead of his time but average man who is 100 years behind it.
The average man's love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth... It takes a special sort of man to understand and enjoy liberty - and he is usually an outlaw in democratic societies.
The presentations and conceptions of the average man of the world are formed and dominated, not by the full and pure desire for knowledge as an end in itself, but by the struggle to adapt himself favourably to the conditions of life.
The fact is that the average man's love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth... Liberty is not a thing for the great masses of men. It is the exclusive possession of a small and disreputable minority, like knowledge, courage and honor. It takes a special sort of man to understand and enjoy liberty - and he is usually an outlaw in democratic societies.
Higgins: I'm an ordinary man, who desires nothing more than just an ordinary chance, to live exactly as he likes, and do precisely what he wants. An average man am I, of no eccentric whim, Who likes to live his life, free of strife Doing whatever he thinks is best for him, Well, just an ordinary man
The average man takes life as a trouble. He is in a chronic state of irritation at the whole performance. He does not learn to differentiate between troubles and difficulties, usually, until some real trouble bowls him over. He fusses about pin-pricks until a mule kicks him. Then he learns the difference.
The average man gets his living by such depressing devices that boredom becomes a sort of natural state to him.
A women can make an average man great, and a great man average.
The average man's opinions are much less foolish than they would be if he thought for himself.
Newspapers have become more important to the average man than the scriptures.
Edison failed ten thousand times before he perfected the modern electric lamp. The average man would have quit at the first failure. That's why there are so many average men and only one Edison.
The average man is hooked to his fellow men, while the warrior is hooked only to infinity.
A man in love is incomplete until he has married. Then he's finished.
A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her.
The average man has a carefully cultivated ignorance about household matters - from what to do with the crumbs to the grocer's telephone number - a sort of cheerful inefficiency which protects him.
I am only an average man but, by George, I work harder at it than the average man.
The average man is more interested in a woman who is interested in him than he is in a woman with beautiful legs.
The average person puts only 25% of his energy and ability into his work.
The successful warrior is the average man, with laser-like focus.
The average man does not know what to do with this life, yet wants another one which will last forever.
The average girl would rather have beauty than brains because she knows the average man can see much better than he can think- Ladies' Home JournalI'd rather have two girls at seventeen than one at thirty-four
The average woman would rather have beauty than brains, because the average man can see better than he can think.
For with him the phantoms of the mind (which to the average man are merely phantoms) projected themselves with a bodily vividness and violence. Not only had they the colour and authority of accomplished fact, they were invested with an immortality denied to facts.
Religion consists in a set of things which the average man thinks he believes and wishes he was certain of.
I will make an average man into an average dancer, provided he be passably well made. I will teach him how to move his arms and legs, to turn his head. I will give him steadiness, brilliancy and speed; but I cannot endow him with that fire and intelligence, those graces and that expression of feeling which is the soul of true pantomime.
I'm sure if one turned one's mind back from grandiose faults to what is happening to the average man or woman or child in the rural areas, we will probably find that's where the energy for development is.
The determination of the average man is not merely a matter of speculative curiosity; it may be of the most important service to the science of man and the social system. It ought necessarily to precede every other inquiry into social physics, since it is, as it were, the basis. The average man, indeed, is in a nation what the centre of gravity is in a body; it is by having that central point in view that we arrive at the apprehension of all the phenomena of equilibrium and motion.
People vote their resentment, not their appreciation. The average man does not vote for anything, but against something.
Science affects the average man and woman in two ways already. He or she benefits by its application driving a motor-car or omnibus instead of a horse-drawn vehicle, being treated for disease by a doctor or surgeon rather than a witch, and being killed with an automatic pistol or shell in place of a dagger or a battle-axe.
We are more gullible and superstitious today than we were in the Middle Ages, and an example of modern credulity is the widespread belief that the Earth is round. The average man can advance not a single reason for thinking that the Earth is round. He merely swallows this theory because there is something about it that appeals to the twentieth century mentality.
Dogs never bite me. Just humans.
Knowledge above the average can be crammed into the average man, but it remains dead, and in the last analysis sterile knowledge. The result is a man who may be a living dictionary but nevertheless falls down miserably in all special situations and decisive moments in life.
Vegetables contain more nutriment than an equal amount of dead flesh. This will sound a surprising and incredible statement to many people, because they have been brought up to believe that they cannot exist unless they defile themselves with flesh, and this delusion is so widely spread that it is difficult to awaken the average man from it.
The average man finds life very uninteresting as it is. And I think the reason why is that he is always waiting for something to happen to him instead of setting to work to make things happen
I am all kinds of a democrat, so far as I can discover but the root of the whole business is this, that I believe in the patriotism and energy and initiative of the average man.
The hardest struggle of all is to be something different from what the average man is.
There is a strong conservative instinct in the average man or woman, born of the hereditary fear of life, that prompts them to cling to old standards, or, if too intelligent to look inhospitably upon progress, to move very slowly. Both types are the brakes and wheelhorses necessary to a stable civilization, but history, even current history in the newspapers, would be dull reading if there were no adventurous spirits willing to do battle for new ideas.
I am persuaded that the world has been tricked into adopting some false and most pernicious notions about consistency - and to such a degree that the average man has turned the rights and wrongs of things entirely around and is proud to be "consistent," unchanging, immovable, fossilized, where it should be his humiliation.
I believe it to be of particular importance that the scientist have an articulate and adequate social philosophy, even more important than the average man should have a philosophy. For there are certain aspects of the relation between science and society that the scientist can appreciate better than anyone else, and if he does not insist on this significance no one else will, with the result that the relation of science to society will become warped, to the detriment of everybody.
But the female mind has demonstrated a capacity for all the mental acquirements and achievements of men, and as generations ensue that capacity will be expanded; the average woman will be as well educated as the average man, and then better educated, for the dormant faculties of her brain will be stimulated to an activity that will be all the more intense and powerful because of centuries of repose. Woman will ignore precedent and startle civilization with their progress.
But the instinct of hoarding, like all other instincts, tends to become hypertrophied and perverted; and with the institution of private property comes another institution-that of plunder and brigandage. In private life, no motive of action is at present so powerful and so persistent as acquisitiveness, which unlike most other desires, knows no satiety. The average man is rich enough when he has a little more than he has got, and not till then.
After reading ... accounts ... of minor accidents of light, it is little wonder that the average man would far rather watch someone else fly and read of the narrow escapes from death when some pilot has had a forced landing or a blowout, than to ride himself. Even in the postwar days of now obsolete equipment, nearly all of the serious accidents were caused by inexperienced pilots who where then allowed to fly or attempt to fly-without license or restrictions about anything they could coax into the air.
The average man is a conformist, accepting miseries and disasters with the stoicism of a cow standing in the rain.
The real beauty of democracy is that the average man believes he is above average.
There is a limited elite that understands the secrets of their own techniques, but not necessarily of all techniques. These men are close to the seat of modern governmental power. The state is no longer founded on the 'average citizen', but on the ability and knowledge of this elite. The average man is altogether unable to penetrate technical secrets or governmental organization and consequently can exert no influence at all on the state.
The truly and deliberately evil men are a very small minority; it is the appeaser who unleashes them on mankind; it is the appeaser's intellectual abdication that invites them to take over. When a culture's dominant trend is geared to irrationality, the thugs win over the appeasers. When intellectual leaders fail to foster the best in the mixed, unformed, vacillating character of people at large, the thugs are sure to bring out the worst. When the ablest men turn into cowards, the average men turn into brutes.
What light is to the eyes - what air is to the lungs - what love is to the heart, liberty is to the soul of man.
A flower cannot blossom without sunshine, and man cannot live without love.