Lionel Trilling Quotes About Culture

Quotes about: Culture

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

  Lionel Trilling

  Honor, Culture, Blame

  Lionel Trilling (2012). “The Liberal Imagination”, p.245, New York Review of Books

• Somewhere in the child, somewhere in the adult, there is a hard, irreducible, stubborn core of biological urgency, and biological necessity, and biological reason that culture cannot reach and that reserves the right, which sooner or later it will exercise, to judge the culture and resist and revise it.

  Lionel Trilling

  Children, Exercise, Judging

  "Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning (Freud: Within and Beyond Culture)". Book by Lionel Trilling, 1965.

• 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.

  Lionel Trilling

  Acceptance, Self, Mutation

  1965 Beyond Culture, introduction.

• Any historian of the literature of the modern age will take virtually for granted the adversary intention, the actually subversive intention, that characterizes modern writing - he will perceive its clear purpose of detaching the reader from the habits of thought and feeling that the larger culture imposes, of giving him a ground and a vantage point from which to judge and condemn, and perhaps revise, the culture that produces him.

  Lionel Trilling

  Writing, Judging, Giving

  Lionel Trilling, Leon Wieseltier (2009). “The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent: Selected Essays”, p.552, Northwestern University Press

• This desire to fashion, to shape, a self and a life has all but gone from a contemporary culture whose emphasis, paradoxically enough, is so much on self.

  Lionel Trilling

  Fashion, Self, Desire

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