John Updike Quotes


Facts are generally overesteemed. For most practical purposes, a thing is what men think it is. When they judged the earth flat, it was flat. As long as men thought slavery tolerable, tolerable it was. We live down here among shadows, shadows among shadows.


Context

See Eddie Bernice Johnson {605259} for a similar view and John Stuart Mill {607508} for an earlier expression. Otis Singletary for a contemporary one {585931} The earliest expression of the idea can be found in the Bhagavad Gita {594723}


Citations

John Updike, Author, Buchanan Dying, 1974

Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations

Linked Quotes

He is one of the later people to express this idea but at the time, most political pundits and politicians were unaware of most of the others. See related quotes.


See Eddie Bernice Johnson {605259} & Barbara Tuchman {626144} for similar views and John Stuart Mill {607508} for an earlier expression. See {638618} for a Sociology principle that is similar. The earliest expression of the idea can be found in the Bhagavad Gita {594723}


See Otis Singletary {585931} for a different expression of the same idea and John Stuart Mill {607508} for the earlier expression. The earliest expression of the idea can be found in the Bhagavad Gita {594723}


Later American politicians expounded the same view. See Otis Singletary {585931} and Eddie Bernice Johnson {605259}. The earliest expression of the idea can be found in the Bhagavad Gita {594723}


Related Quotes
John Updike
John Updike
  • Born: March 18, 1932
  • Died: January 27, 2009
  • Nationality: American
  • Profession: Novelist, Short-story Writer, Poet

John Hoyer Updike was an American novelist, poet, short-story writer, art critic, and literary critic. One of only four writers to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once (the others being Booth Tarkington, William Faulkner, and Colson Whitehead), Updike published more than twenty novels, more than a dozen short-story collections, as well as poetry, art and literary criticism and children's books during his career.