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People who don't know any better will always be in the dark because the power lies in the hands of men who take good care that ordinary folk don't understand, in the hands, that is, of the government, of the clerical party, of the capitalists.

— Cesare Pavese The Moon and the Bonfire (1950)

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Knowledge

More quotes by Cesare Pavese

He told me that it isn't what you do but how you do it that shows whether you are clever or not.

The Moon and the Bonfire (1950)

You've got to understand life, understand it when you're young.

The Beach (1941)

The real affliction of old age is remorse.

The Moon and the Bonfire (1950)

The whole problem of life, then, is this: how to break out of one's own loneliness, how to communicate with others.

This Business of Living (1935)

In the mental disturbance and effort of writing, what sustains you is the certainty that on every page there is something left unsaid.

This Business of Living (1935)

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The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

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It is not in the books of the Philosophers, but in the religious symbolism of the Ancients, that we must look for the footprints of Science, and re-discover the Mysteries of Knowledge.

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Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.

Bertrand Russell

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Cesare Pavese (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.