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A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.

— Saul Bellow To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Account (1976)

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Notes from Wikiquote

Compare: It’s a point so blindingly obvious that only an extraordinarily clever and sophisticated person could fail to grasp it. | John Bercow, 2016.

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Knowledge

More quotes by Saul Bellow

Goodness is achieved not in a vacuum, but in the company of other men, attended by love.

Dangling Man (1944)

For the first time in history, the human species as a whole has gone into politics. Everyone is in the act, and there is no telling what may come of it.

To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Account (1976)

A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.

In an age of enormities, the emotions are naturally weakened.

It All Adds Up (1994)

This is what makes packaged opinion so attractive.

It All Adds Up (1994)

All Saul Bellow quotes →

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You have to start with the truth. The truth is the only way that we can get anywhere. Because any decision-making that is based upon lies or ignorance can't lead to a good conclusion.

Julian Assange

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

H. P. Lovecraft The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

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.

Albert Pike Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (1871)

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

Bertrand Russell

Attribution

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