“Two and two continue to make four, in spite of the whine of the amateur for three, or the cry of the critic for five.”
Whistler v. Ruskin
posthumous published
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James McNeill Whistler 26
American-born, British-based artist 1834–1903Related quotes
Four Saints in Three Acts (1927)
Operas and Plays (1932)
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?
Interview in Speaking Frankly by Wendy Leigh (London: Muller, 1978).
“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
“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
What I Believe (1938)
Context: Whether Parliament is either a representative body or an efficient one is questionable, but I value it because it criticizes and talks, and because its chatter gets widely reported. So two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism. Two cheers are quite enough: there is no occasion to give three.
2014, Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative Town Hall Speech (November 2014)
Context: But I also think that from what I've heard, one of the reforms that will need to take place in universities here is to make sure that in all the departments there is the ability for universities and students to shape curriculums and to have access to information from everywhere around the world, and that it's not just a narrow process of indoctrination. Because the best universities are ones that teach you how to think not what to think, right? A good education is not just knowing facts, although you need to know facts. You need to know that two plus two is four; it's not five. That's an important fact. But you also need to know how to ask questions, and how to critically analyze a problem, and how to be able to distinguish between fact and opinion, and how to compare two different ideas.
