Lionel Trilling - Liberal Imagination (1950)

15 Sourced Quotes

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

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.

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

Lionel Trilling
We are all ill; but even a universal sickness implies an idea of health.

Lionel Trilling
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.

Lionel Trilling
The writer must define his audience by its abilities, by its perfections, so far as he is gifted to conceive them. He does well, if he cannot see his right audience within immediate reach of his voice, to direct his words to his spiritual ancestors, or to posterity, or even, if need be, to a coterie. The writer serves his daemon and his subject. And the democracy that does not know that the daemon and the subject must be served is not, in any ideal sense of the word, a democracy at all.

Lionel Trilling
Some paradox of our natures leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them the objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion.

Lionel Trilling
In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition.

Lionel Trilling
In the American metaphysic, reality is always material reality, hard, resistant, unformed, impenetrable, and unpleasant.

Lionel Trilling
Occasions are rare when the best literature becomes, as it were, the folk literature, and generally speaking literature has always been carried on within small limits and under great difficulties.

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

Lionel Trilling
The poet, it is true, is an effect of environment, but we must remember that he is no less a cause. He may be used as the barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.

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

Lionel Trilling
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.

Lionel Trilling
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