Daily Inspiration Quote by Horace Greeley

"Common sense is very uncommon" lands like a punchline, but it’s really an editor’s diagnosis of democracy. Greeley spent his life in the churn of antebellum and Civil War-era American politics, where public opinion could be loud, moralistic, and spectacularly misinformed all at once. The line works because it flips a comforting civic myth: that “the people” naturally gravitate toward the reasonable. Greeley’s version suggests the opposite - that what we call common sense is not a shared baseline but a scarce resource.

The subtext is newsroom-hard: if reason were truly common, persuasion wouldn’t be a profession. Editors, stump speakers, and reformers wouldn’t need to keep dragging basic facts and basic ethics back into view. Greeley isn’t mocking intelligence so much as the social forces that make good judgment fragile: partisanship, self-interest, fashionable outrage, the seduction of simple stories. “Common” in his sentence isn’t about frequency; it’s about ownership. Common sense is supposed to belong to everyone, yet it keeps getting privatized by circumstance - by who has time to think, who benefits from confusion, who controls the narrative.

It’s also a warning dressed as a quip. In a culture that treats “common sense” as a rhetorical trump card (“any idiot can see…”), Greeley reminds readers that invoking it doesn’t summon it. The irony is that calling something common sense is often what people do when they’ve stopped doing the work of sense at all.