The president felt that it was important to send an ordinary citizen to experience the excitement of space travel as a representative for all Americans.

I have the ordinary experience of being anonymous when I'm in an airplane talking to air-traffic control and they don't know who they're talking to. I have a lot of common experiences.

Ordinary professionalism and 20 years' experience can accomplish a lot but it can't access the hidden places.

As for the forces electromagnetism and gravity we experience in everyday life. But the weak and strong forces are beyond our ordinary experience. So in physics lots of the basic building blocks take 20th- or perhaps 21st-century equipment to explore.

I firmly believe that all human beings have access to extraordinary energies and powers. Judging from accounts of mystical experience heightened creativity or exceptional performance by athletes and artists we harbor a greater life than we know.

I never doubted that equal rights was the right direction. Most reforms most problems are complicated. But to me there is nothing complicated about ordinary equality.

At any rate girls are differently situated. Having no need of deep scientific knowledge their education is confined more to the ordinary things of the world the study of the fine arts and of the manners and dispositions of people.

Abraham Lincoln comes from nothing has no education no money lives in the middle of nowhere on the frontier. And despite the fact that he suffers one tragedy and one setback after another through sheer force of will he becomes something extraordinary: not only the president but the person who almost single-handedly united the country.

I think I usually have quite ordinary dreams. Sometimes my dreams take me to other dimensions. I can travel in my mind especially when I'm dreaming I focus my mind on what I want to dream. If I want to fly I focus on flying.

My dreams were always small and puny. All I ever needed was a little house with a little picket fence by the sea. Little did I know that I would live in Malacanang Palace for 20 years and visit all the major palaces of mankind. And then also meet ordinary citizens and the leaders of superpowers.