"Commonalty" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... would lead to as easily as would any magistrate to-day who had before him a carpenter accused of persuading soldiers that killing is murder. Politicians move on the level of the common intelligence, and compete there with each other in charging the ignorance of the commonalty with emotion. A politician need be no more than something between a curate and a card-sharper. If he knows anything of the arts, of history, of economics, or of science, he had better forget it, or else use it as a forestaller would a knowledge of the time when prices should be ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... of great price. I say of great price, but it is something which costs us nothing because it is all a part of the joy which is in the world for everybody who cares for it. It is the "joy in widest commonalty spread"; it is a rich possession for us if we care for it, but in possessing it we deprive nobody else. The enjoyment of it, the possession of it, excites neither greed nor envy, and it is something which is always ...
— Recreation • Edward Grey
... Anglo-Saxon and German history—which formed such a real limitation to the power of the early Teutonic kings. "Concerning smaller matters", says Tacitus,[31] "the chiefs deliberate; concerning greater matters, the whole nation; but in such wise that even those things which are in the power of the commonalty are discussed in detail by the chiefs. They come together, unless any sudden and accidental emergency have arisen, on fixed days determined by the new or full moon; for these times they deem the most fortunate for the transaction of business. An ill consequence ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... whereof, it being too tedious to insist upon each particular, I shall only mention such in general as are most worthy the remark, from which by analogy we may easily judge of the remainder. And indeed to what purpose would it be singly to recount the commonalty and rabble of mankind, who beyond all question are entirely on my side? and for a token of their vassalage do wear my livery in so many older shapes, and more newly invented modes of Folly, that the lungs of a thousand ...
— In Praise of Folly - Illustrated with Many Curious Cuts • Desiderius Erasmus
... way wrote Benjamin Franklin, some six years after, in that remarkable sheet found among his papers, and called "Declaration of those Rights of the Commonalty of Great Britain, without which they cannot be free." The leading propositions were ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
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