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The book of the world, so richly studied by autodidacts, is being closed by the “learned,” who are raising walls of opinions to shut the world out.

— Saul Bellow Introduction to The Closing of the American Mind (1988)

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Society

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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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)

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts.

William Shakespeare As You Like It (1599)

One country, one constitution, one destiny.

Daniel Webster

Since, in the long run, every planetary society will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring — not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive.

Carl Sagan Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994)

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.