All George Steiner Quotes
- Nothing is more symptomatic of the enervation, of the decompression of the Western imagination, than our incapacity to respond to the landings on the Moon.… Act
- If there is a chronic infirmity by which every teacher ought to be afflicted, it is, indeed, hope. Afflicted
- The very opposite of freedom is cliche, and nothing is less free, more inert with convention and hollow brutality, than a row of four-letter words. Brutality
- The intellectual is, quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book. Book
- The Jew has his anchorage not in place but in time, in his highly developed sense of history as personal context. Six thousand years of… Anchorage
- The journalistic vision sharpens to the point of maximum impact every event, every individual and social configuration; but the honing is uniform. Configuration
- Men are accomplices to that which leaves them indifferent. Accomplices
- To shoot a man because one disagrees with his interpretation of Darwin or Hegel is a sinister tribute to the supremacy of ideas in human… Affair
- Pornographers subvert this last, vital privacy; they do our imagining for us. They take away the words that were of the night and shout them… Hollow
- The violent illiteracies of the graffiti, the clenched silence of the adolescent, the nonsense cries from the stage-happening, are resolutely strategic. The insurgent and the… Accept
- Chess may be the deepest, least exhaustible of pastimes, but it is nothing more. As for a chess genius, he is a human being who… Chess
- Life proceeds amid an incessant network of signals. Amid
- We are still waging Peloponnesian wars. Our control of the material world and our positive science have grown fantastically. But our very achievements turn against… Achievement
- When the modern scholar cites from a classic text, the quotation seems to burn a hole in his own drab page. Burn
- Literary criticism has about it neither rigour nor proof. Where it is honest, it is passionate, private experience seeking to persuade. Criticism
- The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the… Critic
- If future society assumes the contours foretold by Marxism, if the jungle of our cities turns to the polis of man and the dreams of… Anger
- There are three intellectual pursuits, and, so far as I am aware, only three, in which human beings have performed major feats before the age… Age
- Monotheism at Sinai, primitive Christianity, messianic socialism: these are the three supreme moments in which Western culture is presented with what Ibsen termed "the claims… Blackmail
- When it turned on the Jew, Christianity and European civilization turned on the incarnation - albeit an incarnation often wayward and unaware - of its… Albeit