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Our culture peculiarly honors the act of blaming, which it takes as the sign of virtue and intellect.

Lionel Trilling

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Lionel Trilling
Age: 70 †
Born: 1905
Born: July 4
Died: 1975
Died: November 5
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Queens
New York
Born Lionel Mordecai Trilling
Honors
Sign
Intellect
Blame
Honor
Virtue
Takes
Peculiarly
Culture
Blaming

More quotes by Lionel Trilling

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It is now life and not art that requires the willing suspension of disbelief.
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There is no connection between the political ideas of our educated class and the deep places of the imagination.
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In the American Metaphysical, reality is always material reality, hard, resistant, unformed, impenetrable, and unpleasant.
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At the bottom of at least popular Marxism there has always been a kind of disgust with humanity as it is and a perfect faith in humanity as it is to be.
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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.
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Ideology is not the product of thought it is the habit or the ritual of showing respect for certain formulas to which, for various reasons having to do with emotional safety, we have very strong ties of whose meaning and consequences in actuality we have no clear understanding.
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Probably it is impossible for humor to be ever a revolutionary weapon. Candide can do little more than generate irony.
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Youth is a time when we find the books we give up but do not get over.
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We have all in some degree become anarchistic.
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If one defends the bourgeois, philistine virtues, one does not defend them merely from the demonism or bohemianism of the artist but from the present bourgeoisie itself.
Lionel Trilling
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I find righteous denunciations of the present state of the language no less dismaying than the present state of the language.
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Immature ists imitate. Mature ists steal.
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Freud ... showed us that poetry is indigenous to the very constitution of the mind he saw the mind as being, in the greater part of its tendency, exactly a poetry-making faculty.
Lionel Trilling
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Everything which the economist takes from you in the way of life and humanity, he restores to you in the form of money and wealth.
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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.
Lionel Trilling
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The poet is in command of his fantasy, while it is exactly the mark of the neurotic that he is possessed by his fantasy.
Lionel Trilling
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Unless we insist that politics is imagination and mind, we will learn that imagination and mind are politics, and of a kind we will not like.
Lionel Trilling
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Literature is the human activity that make the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.
Lionel Trilling
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The immature artist imitates. The mature artist steals.
Lionel Trilling
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Reasons for not keeping a notebook: 1) the ambiguity of the reader
Lionel Trilling