It is possible that the contemplation of cruelty will not make us humane but cruel; that the reiteration of the badness of our spiritual condition will make us consent to it. — Lionel Trilling Copy Share Image
Our culture peculiarly honors the act of blaming, which it takes as the sign of virtue and intellect. — Lionel Trilling Copy Share
The definitions of humanism are many, but let us here take it to be the attitude of those men who think it an advantage… — Lionel Trilling Copy Share
Literature is the human activity that make the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty. — Lionel Trilling Copy Share
A primary function of art andthought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit… — Lionel Trilling Copy Share
Being a Jew is like walking in the wind or swimming: you are touched at all points and conscious everywhere. — Lionel Trilling Copy Share
It is possible that the contemplation of cruelty will not make us humane but cruel; that the reiteration of the badness of our spiritual… — Lionel Trilling Copy Share
Every neurosis is a primitive form of legal proceeding in which the accused carries on the prosecution, imposes judgment and executes the sentence: all… — Lionel Trilling Copy Share
Some paradox of our natures leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on… — Lionel Trilling Copy Share
In the American Metaphysical, reality is always material reality, hard, resistant, unformed, impenetrable, and unpleasant. — Lionel Trilling Copy Share
“...perhaps we have never been more than vocal and perhaps soon we can hope to be no more than thoughtful...” — Lionel Trilling Copy Share
It is now life and not art that requires the willing suspension of disbelief. — Lionel Trilling Copy Share
Ideology is not the product of thought; it is the habit or the ritual of showing respect for certain formulas to which, for various… — Lionel Trilling Copy Share
There is no connection between the political ideas of our educated class and the deep places of the imagination. — Lionel Trilling Copy Share
The function of literature, through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and the high authority of… — Lionel Trilling Copy Share
Unless we insist that politics is imagination and mind, we will learn that imagination and mind are politics, and of a kind we will… — Lionel Trilling Copy Share
