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Probably it is impossible for humor to be ever a revolutionary weapon. Candide can do little more than generate irony.

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
Impossible
Rebellious
Littles
Weapon
Ever
Irony
Little
Revolutionary
Weapons
Revolution
Humor
Candide
Probably
Generate

More quotes by Lionel Trilling

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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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Youth is a time when we find the books we give up but do not get over.
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It is now life and not art that requires the willing suspension of disbelief.
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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.
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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.
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Literature is the human activity that make the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.
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The diminution of the reality of class, however socially desirable in many respects, seems to have the practical effect of diminishing our ability to see people in their difference and specialness.
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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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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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We properly judge a critic's virtue not by his freedom from error but by the nature of the mistakes he does make, for he makes them, if he is worth reading, because he has in mind something besides his perceptions about art in itself - he has in mind the demands that he makes upon life.
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It is one thing, then, to say, The Bible contains the religion revealed by God , and quite another to say, Whatever is contained in the Bible is religion, and was revealed by God. If the latter be accepted, metaphor and allegory become literal statements and the errors and absurdities of bibliolatry follow.
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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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I find righteous denunciations of the present state of the language no less dismaying than the present state of the language.
Lionel Trilling
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Reasons for not keeping a notebook: 1) the ambiguity of the reader
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There is no connection between the political ideas of our educated class and the deep places of the imagination.
Lionel Trilling
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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.
Lionel Trilling
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Our culture peculiarly honors the act of blaming, which it takes as the sign of virtue and intellect.
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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.
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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.
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In the American Metaphysical, reality is always material reality, hard, resistant, unformed, impenetrable, and unpleasant.
Lionel Trilling