“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.”
Free Speech and Plain Language (1936)
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?
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Albert Jay Nock 68
American journalist 1870–1945Related quotes
Whistler v. Ruskin
posthumous published
“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.”
Variant: Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
Source: 1984
“Even God cannot make two times two not make four.”
As quoted in Delbert D. Thiessen (ed.), A Sociobiology Compendium: Aphorisms, Sayings, Asides, p. 18
Interview in Speaking Frankly by Wendy Leigh (London: Muller, 1978).
Four Saints in Three Acts (1927)
Operas and Plays (1932)
“Five years ago I was a four-stone apology — today I am two separate gorillas.”
Mr. Apollo
Others
Variant: You can make more friends in two months by being interested in them, than in two years by making them interested in you.
Source: How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936), p. 52 (in 1998 edition)