Common sense is genius in homespun.

The world is shocked, or amused, by the sight of saintly old people hindering in the name of morality the removal of obvious brutalities from a legal system.

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.

Great people plant trees they'll never sit under.

What we perceive as the present is the vivid fringe of memory tinged with anticipation.

...the self-satisfied dogmatism with which mankind at each period of its history cherishes the delusion of the finality of existing modes of knowledge.

Now in creative thought common sense is a bad master. Its sole criterion for judgement is that the new ideas shall look like the old ones. In other words it can only work by suppressing originality.