Lionel Trilling
Lionel Trilling
Lionel Mordecai Trillingwas an American literary critic, short story writer, essayist, and teacher. He was one of the leading U.S. critics of the twentieth century who traced the contemporary cultural, social, and political implications of literature. With his wife Diana Trilling, whom he married in 1929, he was a member of the New York Intellectuals and contributor to the Partisan Review...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionCritic
Date of Birth4 July 1905
CountryUnited States of America
Educating a son I should allow him no fairy tales and only a very few novels. This is to prevent him from having 1. the sense of romantic solitude (if he is worth anything he will develop a proper and useful solitude) which identification with the hero gives. 2. cant ideas of right and wrong, absurd systems of honor and morality which never will he be able completely to get rid of, 3. the attainment of ''ideals',' of a priori desires, of a priori emotions. He should amuse himself with fact only: he will then not learn that if the weak younger son do or do not the magical honorable thing he will win the princess with hair like flax.
In the American metaphysic, reality is always material reality, hard, resistant, unformed, impenetrable, and unpleasant.
Being a Jew is like walking in the wind or swimming: you are touched at all points and conscious everywhere.
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.
We have all in some degree become anarchistic.
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.
We who are liberal and progressive know that the poor are our equals in every sense except that of being equal to us.
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.