“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 Wilson 192
author 1931–2013Related quotes

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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?

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“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