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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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"If a moneyed man had a "corny mind, a flatterer would immediately start chasing him like a hungry hen!"
"A government which is not liked by the artists is certainly a bad government, because artist sees very well what is behind the masks!"
"An honest government is the childish dream of the gullible men!"
"Our spiritual history is the history of God-ventriloquists! The truth is that the voice of God is the voice of cunning Man, the ventriloquist's voice!"
"Most of the time it is a good job and a good honour to fight against people's values, because most of the time people's values are irrational and absurd!"
"A country where women are not free has no chance ever to be something good and respectable!"
"Governments stand because people sit; if people stand, governments will sit!"
"It is better to go near the truth and be imprisoned than to stay with the wrong and roam about freely, master Galilei. In fact, getting attached to falsity is terrible slavery, and real freedom is only next to the right."
"For breakfast to be called 'in bed' instead of 'on top of a bed,' the house in which it is about to be eaten has to have at least two rooms (excluding the kitchen); (at least) three, if it has a bathroom."
Explore more quotes by Lionel Trilling
"Our culture peculiarly honors the act of blaming, which it takes as the sign of virtue and intellect."
"The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather."
"Probably it is impossible for humor to be ever a revolutionary weapon. Candide can do little more than generate irony."
"This is the great vice of academicism, that it is concerned with ideas rather than with thinking."
"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."
"Being a Jew is like walking in the wind or swimming: you are touched at all points and conscious everywhere."
"Every neurosis is a primitive form of legal proceeding in which the accused carries on the prosecution, imposes judgment and executes the sentence: all to the end that someone else should not perform the same process."
"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."
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