“The real issue is not whether two and two make four or whether two and two make five, but whether life advances by men who love words or men who love living.”
Source: The Outsider (1956), Chapter Nine, Breaking the Circuit
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Colin Wilson192
author 1931–2013Related quotes
John Barrowman (1967) Scottish-American actor, singer, dancer, musical theatre performer, writer and television personality
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Context: Get up in one of our industrial centres today and say that two and two make four, and if there is any financial interest concerned in maintaining that two and two make five, the police will bash your head in. Then what choice have you, save to degenerate either into a fool or into a hypocrite? And who wants to live in a land of fools and hypocrites?
Newton Lee American computer scientist
Facebook Nation: Total Information Awareness (2nd Edition), 2014
“Even God cannot make two times two not make four.”
Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) philosopher
As quoted in Delbert D. Thiessen (ed.), A Sociobiology Compendium: Aphorisms, Sayings, Asides, p. 18
“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.”
George Orwell book 1984
Variant: Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
Source: 1984