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A dollar is something that you multiply — something that causes an expansion of your house and your mechanical equipment, something that accelerates like speed; and that may be also slowed up or deflated. It is a value that may be totally imaginary, yet can for a time provide half-realized dreams.

— Edmund Wilson Europe without Baedeker (1947)

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More quotes by Edmund Wilson

In a sense, one can never read the book that the author originally wrote, and one can never read the same book twice.

The Triple Thinkers (1938)

There is really no way of considering a book independently of one's special sensations in reading it on a particular occasion.

The Triple Thinkers (1938)

It may be that there is nothing more demoralizing than a small but adequate income.

Memoirs of Hecate County (1946)

Education, the last hope of the liberal in all periods.

To the Finland Station : A Study in the Acting and Writing of History (1940)

Marxism is the opium of the intellectuals.

Memoirs of Hecate County (1946)

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Men accept servility in order to acquire wealth; as if they could acquire anything of their own when they cannot even assert that they belong to themselves.

Étienne de La Boétie Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (1548)

Health is the greatest gift, contentment is the greatest wealth, a trusted friend is the best relative, Nibbana is the greatest bliss.

Gautama Buddha

Opulence is always the result of theft, if not committed by the actual possessor, then by his predecessor.

Jerome The Cry for Justice (1915)

Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract quantities. To the Enlightenment, that which does not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one, becomes illusion.

Max Horkheimer Dialektik der Aufklärung [Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944)

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