Lionel Trilling

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.