“Granting that an illusion may have its uses, it can only be of service so long as we do not know it to be an illusion.”
p. 96 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=wu.89009314162&view=1up&seq=100 <br class="br">Determinism or Free-will? (1912)
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Chapman Cohen8
British atheist and secularist writer and lecturer 1868–1954Related quotes
Daniel J. Boorstin (1914–2004) American historian
Source: The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961), p. 261.
“All the people we used to know, they're an illusion to me now…”
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Song lyrics, Blood on the Tracks (1975), Tangled Up In Blue
“The painful truth is that while we might have the illusion, none of us are free.”
Laura Anne Gilman book Flesh and Fire
Source: Flesh and Fire (2009), p. 304
“Cinema: An illusion that can only satisfactorily happen in the dark.”
Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director
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“We have built illusions round us and see no way out of the glass forest.”
Brian W. Aldiss (1925–2017) British science fiction author
The Glass Forest (1986)
Context: Plato would have no actors in his republic, in case pretence devoured what was real. Plato's fears have proved well-grounded. Actors, despised, almost outcast, until last century, have become something more than respectable. They, together with all those imitation actors, pop stars, TV celebrities, people who are famous for being famous, now receive adulation. They are the millionaires, the courtesans of our system. Solzhenitsyn, escaping to a West he had once admired, snarled at the meretricious falsity of what he found. We have built illusions round us and see no way out of the glass forest.