LIONEL TRILLING

The poet is in command of his fantasy, while it is exactly the mark of the neurotic that he is possessed by his fantasy.

It is now life and not art that requires the willing suspension of disbelief.

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

What marks the artist is his power to shape the material of pain we all have.

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.

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.

This is the great vice of academicism, that it is concerned with ideas rather than with thinking.

We are all ill: but even a universal sickness implies an idea of health.

Youth is a time when we find the books we give up but do not get over.

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.

There is no connection between the political ideas of our educated class and the deep places of the imagination.

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

Where misunderstanding serves others as an advantage, one is helpless to make oneself understood.

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.

We who are liberal and progressive know that the poor our equals in every sense except that of being equal to us.

The production of goods had become an end in itself and the consumption of goods only the means to further production.

Economic Man faces a merciless world alone and unaided, his hand against every other's.

The real problems of our economy began when the very smart people of our society went to Wall Street.

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.

Even the nonreligious may exercise aesthetic judgment in matters of religion, and indeed our age has given the unbelieving a sophisticated taste in religious literature.

After all, no one is ever taken in by the happy ending, but we are often divinely fuddled by the tragic curtain.

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.

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.