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"The function of literature, through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and the high authority of the self in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive."
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"Though the earth contains greater energy and mass than any single being, linked together, "people make the world go-round"."
"It takes a long time before we cease to feel proud of being wanted. Though God knows why we should feel it, when we look around and see who is wanted too."
"The great majority of Baghdad is a slum - a lot of it's new, but it's still slum. It's usually this concrete-block, one-room design with a door and a window, arranged one-up, one-down, often with a shop with nothing in it on the first floor, and then a one-room apartment above it. There's street after street after street of that stuff."
"Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities " but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world."
"Every nation needs a crystal clear mirror to see its stupidities, to see its hypocrisies, to see its faults and its evils! No nation is saint! Every nation's history is full of primitiveness and barbarity, full of wars and murders! Let every nation sees its face very clearly! Let them face their faces so that in the future they may be something better!"
"Land: A part of the earth's surface, considered as property. The theory that land is property subject to private ownership and control is the foundation of modern society, and is eminently worthy of the superstructure."
"Nationality is the miracle of political independence; race is the principle of physical analogy."
Explore more quotes by Lionel Trilling
"Probably it is impossible for humor to be ever a revolutionary weapon. Candide can do little more than generate irony."
"Our culture peculiarly honors the act of blaming, which it takes as the sign of virtue and intellect."
"Being a Jew is like walking in the wind or swimming: you are touched at all points and conscious everywhere."
"We are at heart so profoundly anarchistic that the only form of state we can imagine living in is Utopian; and so cynical that the only Utopia we can believe in is authoritarian."
"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."
"The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather."
"There is no connection between the political ideas of our educated class and the deep places of the imagination."
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