Quotes & Sayings About Common Denominator

The more repression there is, the more need there is for irreverence toward those who are responsible for that repression. But too often sarcasm passes for irony, name-calling passes for insight, bleeped-out four-letter words pass for wit, and lowest-common-denominator jokes pass for analysis. Satire should have a point of view. It doesn't have to get a belly laugh. It does have to present criticism. — Paul Krassner

The office was a treasure trove for those who delighted in the macabre. It was the Smithsonian of the Lowest Common Denominator. My — Kenneth C. Johnson

I try to write for highest common denominator. I don't write for dumb people. I figure if everybody doesn't get it, that's OK. Someone bright enough will get it, and that's who I write for. It's probably not the way to make million-sellers. What can I say? I won't apologize for trying to write for smart people. — Paul Westerberg

I don't think that brutality and idealism are mutually exclusive. It's a common denominator in my work - rabid idealism. — Richard Grossman

[The] first postulate of the Principle of Uniformity, namely, that the laws of nature are invariant with time, is not peculiar to that principle or to geology, but is a common denominator of all science. In fact, instead of being an assumption or an ad hoc hypothesis, it is simply a succinct summation of the totality of all experimental and observational evidence. — M. King Hubbert

Marxian Socialism and Bolshevism are two historical phenomena which have hardly a single common denominator. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

If mass communications blend together harmoniously, and often unnoticeably, art, politics, religion, and philosophy with commercials, they bring these realms of culture to their common denominator
the commodity form. The music of the soul is also the music of salesmanship. Exchange value, not truth value, counts. — Herbert Marcuse

One must avoid snobbery and misanthropy. But one must also be unafraid to criticise those who reach for the lowest common denominator, and who sometimes succeed in finding it. This criticism would be effortless if there were no "people" waiting for just such an appeal. Any fool can lampoon a king or a bishop or a billionaire. A trifle more grit is required to face down a mob, or even a studio audience that has decided it knows what it wants and is entitled to get it. And the fact that kings and bishops and billionaires often have more say than most in forming appetites and emotions of the crowd is not irrelevant, either. — Christopher Hitchens

As I travel around the country, I'm finding a common denominator - people are hurting and going through regardless of race and creed. The common denominators are people HURTING people. The cure also has a common denominator - people start HELPING people. — Bobby F. Kimbrough Jr.

The single common denominator of men and women who achieve great things is a sense of destiny. — Brian Tracy

All the leadership positions that I have had have one common denominator: none has required that I give up my science work. — Mildred S. Dresselhaus

We have a lowest-common-denominator Christianity being taught in so many denominations that has produced a people who simply do not know some of the most basic Christian truths. — Albert Mohler

Radio football is football reduced to its lowest common denominator. — Nick Hornby

... the only common denominator in all of your failed relationships is you. — Richard Labonte

I don't view the fans in the way that most performers do. As a mass of people who have paid money, I know what they want. It's a very, very, very, very, very low common denominator. — Pete Townshend

My father was - actually was an Episcopal priest as a young man. Became a psychotherapist, a psychologist. My mother is Jewish, so I grew up in a mixed background. But the common denominator was certainly music, and that was sort of emphasized in my household as music being sort of the spiritual force. — Joshua Bell

The evils of mankind are caused, not by the primary aggressiveness of individuals, but by their self-transcending identification with groups whose common denominator is low intelligence and high emotionality. — Arthur Koestler

The common denominator is that we want to make the world a better place, for women and for everybody, and we do it through sport. — Lyn St. James

Everybody goes down to a least common denominator, and as a result, productivity goes down to zero. And we've seen that in every communist country around the world. — Rafael Cruz

Simply put, I believe we should not seek the lowest common denominator when it comes to wilderness and saddle a wilderness designation with exceptions, exclusions, and exemptions. — Nick Rahall

There seems to be at least one common denominator to all intelligent life: it was bipedal and bimannual. Four legs was the most practical number for any animal on any planet, and it seems that nature has nothing else to work with. When she decided to give intelligence to a species, she taught him to stand on his hind legs, freeing his forefeet to become tools of his intellect. And she usually taught him by making him use his hands to climb. As a Cophian biologist had said, Life first tries to climb a tree to get to the stars. When it fails, it comes down and invents the high-C drive. — Walter M. Miller Jr.

A common denominator among big guys like me who are trying to take care of our health is that we're not getting enough sleep. — Michael Moore

The thing is to be brave and move the audience with you, instead of cater to the lowest common denominator, you know, slipping on a banana peel and falling on your ass. You got to move the audience a little further ahead in terms of their appreciation of what is comedy. It's complicated. — Mel Brooks

The defining characteristic of today's intellectual and media elite is that it swims merrily in a sea of fantasy. The world of television is essentially a fantasy world, and television is today's [1980's] common denominator of communication, today's unifying American experience. This has frightening implications for the future. Ideas that fit on bumper stickers are not ideas at all, they simply are attitudes. And attitudinizing is no substitute for analysis. Unfortunately, too often television is to news as bumper stickers are to philosophy, and this has a corrosive effect on public understanding of those issues on which national survival may depend. — Richard M. Nixon

Hysteria is a natural phenomenon, the common denominator of the female nature. It's the female weapon and the test of a man is his ability to cope with it. — Tennessee Williams

If anything, 'Fifty Shades of Grey' is a generic romance cynically engineered to appeal to the lowest common denominator of female fantasy. — Meghan Daum

A treatment method or an educational method that will work for one child may not work for another child. The one common denominator for all of the young children is that early intervention does work, and it seems to improve the prognosis. — Temple Grandin

I am not qualified to deal with this. Why does everyone I meet seem to have mental problems?
Ah ... but did they have mental problems before meeting you? Who's the common denominator here, Dan?
I do not have mental problems! I say to the voice in my head, perfectly aware how damning it would sound were I to say it aloud. — Eoin Colfer

We -- the industrialized, technologized world -- have never been richer. And yet to an extraordinary extent we in the West continue to inhabit a moral and cultural universe shaped by the hedonistic imperatives and radical ideals of the Sixties. Culturally, morally the world we inhabit is increasingly a trash world: addicted to sensation, besieged everywhere by the cacophonous, mind-numbing din of rock music, saturated with pornography, in thrall to the lowest common denominator wherever questions of taste, manners or intellectual delicacy are concerned. Marwick was right: 'The cultural revolution, in short, had continuous, uninterrupted, and lasting consequences'. — Roger Kimball

More than ambition, more than ability, it is rules that limit contribution; rules are the lowest common denominator of human behavior. They are a substitute for rational thought. — Hyman G. Rickover

Truth is not subjective, like some people think. There are basic truths that cannot be denied. I like to call them "Common Denominator Truths," such as the need to be loved, the need for warmth and shelter, the need for food and drink, and so on. These common core truths are at the center of being human, and no matter how much humanity tries to alter their own perception of what matters in this world, these basic truths cannot be ignored. — Lyra Shanti

Most of us, however committed we are to our ideals, will find ourselves every now and again reading an attention-grabbing headline from the Daily Mail or some other lowest-common denominator. That's not the same thing as frequenting a site like the white supremacist Stormfront. — Mallory Ortberg

Now, the big box office successes are superhero stories. It seems there's a lowest common denominator mentality, in terms of movies that are almost purely visual, that anyone can understand anywhere in the world. Good robot, bad robot: they fight. You don't need to know anything apart from that. And then we can make toys that look like that robot - and sell those toys or video games. — Terence Winter

Money is just one of the forces that blind us to information and issues which we could pay attention to - but don't. It exacerbates and often rewards all the other drivers of willful blindness; our preference for the familiar, our love for individuals and for big ideas, a love of busyness and our dislike of conflict and change, the human instinct to obey and conform and our skill at displacing and diffusing responsibility. All of these operate and collaborate with varying intensities at different moments in our lives. The common denominator is that they all make us protect our sense of self-worth, reducing dissonance and conferring a sense of security, however illusory. In some ways, they all act like money; making us feel good at first, with consequences we don't see. We wouldn't be so blind if our blindness didn't deliver rewards; the benefit of comfort and ease. — Margaret Heffernan

I find that when I'm struggling to think of how a six-year-old would feel about something, I just have to go right down to the common denominator, find the simplest way that you can look at an object or a problem, and not muck it up with all of the stuff that adults do and over-analyze. — Barbara Park

Nothing succeeds like persistence. The common denominator of all successful people is their persistence. — Roger Delano Hinkins

Because he thinks Facebook is the lowest common denominator of social discourse. Though he does like to talk about social media as a vehicle for constructing and performing identity. Whatever the hell that means. — Becky Albertalli

She saw the faces streaming past her, the faces made alike by fear - fear as a common denominator, fear of themselves, fear of all and of one another, fear making them ready to pounce upon whatever was held sacred by any single one they met ... She had kept herself clean and free in a single passion - to touch nothing. She had liked facing them in the streets, she had liked the impotence of their hatred, because she offered them nothing to be hurt. — Ayn Rand

We have almost succeeded in leveling all human activities to the common denominator of securing the necessities of life and providing for their abundance. — Hannah Arendt

People have rituals for communing with the dead, rituals that depend more on the idiosyncrasies of the individual than on the influence of culture. Some visit gravesites. Some talk to portraits, or mantelpiece urns. Some go to spots favored by the deceased during life, or mouth silent prayers in houses of worship, or have trees planted in memory in some far-off land. The common denominator, of course, is a sense beyond logic that the dead are aware of all this, that they can hear the prayers and witness the deeds and feel the ongoing love and longing. People seem to find that sense comforting. I don't believe any of it. I've never seen a soul depart from a body. I've never been haunted by a ghost, angry or loving. I've never been rewarded or punished or touched by some traveler from the undiscovered country. I know as well as I know anything the dead are simply dead. — Barry Eisler

Their common denominator of humanism could not be reconciled with the Biblical view of man's depravity after the Fall and his need of salvation. Too late, many ministers began to see that hippie non-conformity with, and rejection of, the world was hardly the same as that high spiritual quest advocated by the Apostle Paul. — Bob Larson

I think that, regardless of our culture, age, or even personal handicaps, we can still strive for something exceptional. Why not expand our sights instead of restricting our lives and accepting the lowest common denominator of a dormant existence? Faith ... will permit us to take a chance on a new path, perhaps different from the one we now follow. It may be surprising where it leads. — Jimmy Carter

The British media is sinking down, as the American news media has lowered the bar for all of humanity. British news media is definitely trying to stoop down to that level. Everyone is stooping to the lowest common denominator. — John Oliver

Here were the same long cold bare corridors, the same lowest common denominator of design and decoration, with every light source designed so as to irritate as few people as possible and to please just as few. — Isaac Asimov

I want to say to anyone who works in a drone workplace, raise the bar! There's no reason why you have to dress to the lowest common denominator. — Tim Gunn

Woman reduces us all to a common denominator. — George Bernard Shaw

Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common denominator. — George Santayana

The common denominator all Latinos have is that we want some respect. That's what we're all fighting for. — Cristina Saralegui

It is Hell, of course, that makes priests powerful, not Heaven, for after thousands of years of so-called civilization fear remains the one common denominator of mankind — H.L. Mencken

Time and suffering are inseperable. In life, as in physics, both are the common denominator of all experiences. — Christopher Dutton

Most of the time people are aiming so low on television. They're trying to reach that common denominator, especially on network television. — Dylan McDermott

If I look over my life, every single step of maturing for me, every single one, has had the exact same common denominator: accepting what was true over what I wished were true. — Julia Sweeney

There is a brotherhood within the body of believers, and the Lord Jesus Christ is the common denominator. Friendship and fellowship are the legal tender among believers. — J. Vernon McGee

The best places to live, work, and visit are those places that are willing to uphold their standards in the face of pressure to allow lowest common denominator development ... Successful communities understand that when they say no to development that is contrary to the long-term health of their community, they will almost always get better development in its place. — Ed McMahon

In organizations where nothing much happens regardless of whether you do something exceptional or just show up in the morning, the best people lose heart and motivation is reduced near the lowest common denominator. — Judith M Bardwick

As God took me through the journey that became the Bible study 'Breaking Free', He taught me to look for a common denominator among the things that triggered my destructive habits. — Beth Moore

I respect the audience's intelligence a lot, and that's why I don't try to go for the lowest common denominator. — Spike Lee

[A] common denominator in European wars going back to the Crusades
no matter who won or lost, the one fairly reliable constant was that Jews somewhere were going to suffer. — Scott Anderson

People with mental health problems are almost never dangerous. In fact, they are more likely to be the victims than the perpetrators. At the same time, mental illness has been the common denominator in one act of mass violence after another. — Roy Blunt

Militant homosexuals, pro-abortionists, occultists, New Agers, pornographers, radical feminists, atheists, paganists and a whole collection of angry anti-Christian groups are all coming out of their closets and onto the battlefield. Their common denominator is a hatred for Christianity and for any expression of traditional values. — Carman

Inside a company, you can mandate that everyone use the same technology, which means you can go a little bit, I don't know, higher fidelity than the lowest common denominator technology. — Stewart Butterfield

We have to take risks in British television. It has to stop playing to the lowest common denominator and patronising people. — Charles Dance

I've never really been very good at marriage. It's one of my failures. I've tried my best, but I do realise the common denominator is me; it's something I'm doing. — Len Goodman

Email has the virtue - sounds like a bad thing, but it's the virtue of being the lowest common denominator messaging protocol. Everyone can have it. It can cross organizational boundaries. No one owns it. It's not some particular company's platform. — Stewart Butterfield

Successful men are influenced by the desire for pleasing results. Failures are influenced by the desire for pleasing methods and are inclined to be satisfied with such results as can be obtained by doing things they like to do. The common denominator of success - the secret of every man who has ever been successful - lies in the fact that he formed the habit of doing things that failures don't like to do. — Albert L. Gray

Primitive, simplistic anti-Communism is all too often used as a common denominator for diverse efforts to perpetuate one's own power in a democratic system, convert opinions into dogma, and kill off all opposition, even silent. — Eugen Kogon

Both therapy and friendship possessed the common denominator of discovering a self ... — Dorothy Gilman

The common denominator is that we all need help. — Judah Smith

Before I thought there was a common denominator between my films - as if all my characters were sisters - but I'm not so sure now. — Juliette Binoche

I admit at the beginning that 'popular religion,' 'demotic religion,' the pieties of the common folk, tends to sink to the lowest common denominator, be it in syncretizing saints with old, half-forgotten pagan godlings, or in preferring the nasal whine and the revivalist shoutin' to solid sense and learning, regarding intellect as positively inimical to the workings of the Holy Ghost. But it is in American religious life, especially Protestant American religious life, that things bottom out completely. — Markham Shaw Pyle

Personally, I am far from convinced that the British system is suited to India. The parliamentary democracy we have adopted involves the British perversity of electing a legislature to form an executive: this has created a unique breed of legislator, largely unqualified to legislate, who has sought election only in order to wield (or influence) executive power. It has produced governments obliged to focus more on politics than on policy or performance. It has distorted the voting preferences of an electorate that knows which individuals it wants but not necessarily which policies. It has spawned parties that are shifting alliances of individual interests rather than the vehicles of coherent sets of ideas. It has forced governments to concentrate less on governing than on staying in office, and obliged them to cater to the lowest common denominator of their coalitions. It is time for a change. Pluralist — Shashi Tharoor

There is something powerful in the whispering of obscenities, about those in power. There's something delightful about it, something naughty, secretive, forbidden, thrilling. It's like a spell, of sorts. It deflates them, reduces them to the common denominator where they can be dealt. — Margaret Atwood

No matter how comfortable I felt at SymboGen, I needed to remember how good they were at taking things and reducing them to their lowest common denominator. — Mira Grant

Each person has the potential to be good and productive, yet I also know that many people never begin to tap their true potential. It is human nature to surrender to the lowest common denominator. We must purposely strive to move ahead and achieve. — John Patrick Hickey

Let's make really good stories that people get something out of. That's the one common denominator with everything I try to do. — Frank Spotnitz

I'm an anarchist. I'm implacably opposed to heirarchical systems of power and control. I also mistrust crowds, as they often operate according to their lowest common denominator. In terms of evolutionary psychology, the crowd is very close to a herd of stampeding wildebeest. — Will Self

She cannot escape marriage; it is her sacred Hindu duty, just as giving her away in marriage was her father's sacred Hindu duty. Like Indian Independence, marriage is her ultimate 'Tryst with Destiny,' and it is not in her hand to escape her preordained and compulsory fate. A marriageable daughter is the lowest common denominator in the giant scheme of things. — Chandana Roy

Youth leaders, are you holding aloft our standards, or have you compromised them for the lowest common denominator in order to appease the deceived or vile within the Church? Are the dances and music in your cultural halls virtuous, lovely, praiseworthy, and of good report (Articles of Faith 13), or do they represent a modern Sodom with short skirts, loud beat, strobe lights, and darkness? — Ezra Taft Benson

I believe life is constantly testing us for our level of commitment, and life's
greatest rewards are reserved for those who demonstrate a never-ending
commitment to act until they achieve. This level of resolve can move mountains, but it must be constant and consistent. As simplistic as this may
sound, it is still the common denominator separating those who live their
dreams from those who live in regret. — Anthony Robbins

I have noticed a common denominator among my smart and successful single friends, who tend to over-analyze and underestimate the opposite sex far more than their peers. — Lauren Iungerich

If more people would try and reach up instead of going to the lowest common denominator, I think we'd be a lot better off. — Mary Badham

Love is the common denominator that unites all people whatever religion they are.-Rumi — Ahmet Umit

It is really one of the most serious faults which can be found with the whole conception of democracy, that its cultural function must move on the basis of the common denominator. Such a point of view indeed would make a mess of all of the values which we have developed for examining works of art. It would address one end of education in that it would consider that culture which was available to everyone, but in that achievement it would eliminate culture itself.
This is surely the death of all thought.
This quote is taken from "The Artist's Reality: Philosophies of Art" by Mark Rothko, written 1940-1 and published posthumously in 2004 by Yale University Press, pp.126-7. — Mark Rothko

Gangsta rap often reaches higher than its ugliest, lowest common denominator, misogyny, violence, materialism and sexual transgression are not its exclusive domain. At its best, this music draws attention to complex dimensions of ghetto life ignored by most Americans. Indeed, gangsta rap's in-your-face style may do more to force America to confront crucial social problems than a million sermons or political speeches. — Michael Eric Dyson

Any artist, the work you do, if it's a painting or if it's a performance, you hope it translates to a common denominator with the people that they see something in their own life in there. Or they see something in somebody else's life. That's what's fun about sharing art. — Matthew McConaughey

If we must withhold all ribbing in the name of protecting everyone's feelings, then we truly are a toothless society. We will reach what I call the lowest common denominator of butthurt. — George Takei

The safest way to success is to write according to the capacity of the stupidest member of the audience. — Natasha Pulley

Often our students see nothing about religious faith except the lowest common denominator. They see nothing but TV evangelists and fools, and it doesn't occur to them that intelligent people might find this religious business worth living their lives by. — Doris Betts

Segregation or separation is thus a basic principle of Biblical Law with respect to religion and morality. Every attempt to destroy this principle is an effort to reduce society to its lowest common denominator. — R.J. Rushdoony

The common denominator is a love of music. — Natasha Bedingfield

The awfulness of Monday mornings is the world's greatest common denominator. To the millionaire and the coolie it is the same, because there can be nothing worse. — Kenneth Fearing

A common denominator in every single nuclear accident - a nuclear plant or on a nuclear submarine - is that before the specialists even know what has happened, they rush to the media saying, 'There's no danger to the public.' They do this before they themselves know what has happened because they are terrified that the public might react violently, either by panic or by revolt. — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

For decades, we've worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a steadily declining path toward lowest-common-denominator standards, presumably because the 'masses' want dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies want to give the masses what they want. — Steven Johnson

I think faith is the one common denominator between everything that goes on at the race track - a faith in Christ. — Kyle Petty

I always go to the lowest common denominator for that ingredient. So if I think squash, I try to think what it means to me
and if it doesn't mean anything to me, I'm not gonna do well when I cook it. So [squash] means to me: fall, maple syrup, cinnamon, and things just come into your head so you can narrow the vortex and make it a bit smaller and you go with something because there's no time. — Geoffrey Zakarian

Theft is the one unforgivable sin, the one common denominator of all sins. When you kill a man, you steal a life. You steal his wife's right to a husband, rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone's right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness. There is no act more wretched then stealing. — Khaled Hosseini

Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh. — W. H. Auden

Friendship is the underlying element, the common denominator of every relationship. — Shahla Khan

You have a poem called "Bad Theology." What would you call a bad theology?
I guess any theology that presumes to have God in its pocket. Can I explain this without sinning further? We'll find out. The community in which I was raised did what they would call theology, but it was always a kind of cranky, brutal reduction of lush and beautiful complexities into the lowest common denominator, the dullest version. But when I went away to school and started reading more, I became increasingly dissatisfied with any theology that replaces the enormous, immeasurable real with very measurable and very calculated replacements. I'm not saying this very eloquently, but I guess bad theology articulates as definitive and conclusive that which is unknowable and without end. — Tony Leuzzi

it, something naughty, secretive, forbidden, thrilling. It's like a spell, of sorts. It deflates them, reduces them to the common denominator where they can be dealt with. — Margaret Atwood