Quotes from Edmund Wilson

No two persons ever read the same book.

Education, the last hope of the liberal in all periods.

The Jew lends himself easily to Communism because it enables him to devote himself to a high cause, involving all of humanity, characteristics which are natural to him as a Jew.

The product of the scientific imagination is a new vision of relations - like that of artistic imagination.

with which we have attempted to clothe it; I am trying — as in the book that follows — to remove the whole subject from the plane of morality and to give an objective account of the expansion of the United States.

more and more ferocious to devour the South.

Whitman believed himself, at the time when Drum-Taps was published, that it was so far the best thing he had written. It certainly contained the best poetry that was written during the war on the subject

had taken place just before Grant's visit, and Wilhelm was unable to receive him. "Here is an old man," says Bismarck, — "one of the kindest old gentlemen in the world — and yet they must try and shoot him!

classic (though one that I cannot help thinking a little overrated), and there is no point in describing her poetry here.

That's the trouble with all you liberals: you think that people ought to be kept alive just because they happen to exist.

Now, aside from this self-confident ambition, what kind of man was Lincoln? There has undoubtedly been written about him more romantic and sentimental rubbish than about any other American figure, with the possible exception of Edgar Allan Poe;

Should the war not have earlier been brought to an end? Could it not, in fact, have been prevented? Should Fort Sumter have been relieved? Would it not have been a good deal less disastrous if the South had been allowed to secede? All these questions have been debated; and yet — except, of course, in the South — the ordinary American does not often ask them.

Se o Velho e o Novo Testamentos representam a Revelação Divina, tais investigações não têm importância. Se eles são obra puramente humana, então é a curiosidade humana que nos impele a investigar como foram escritos e qual é sua relação com um culto de imenso prestígio

THE Canadian Morley Callaghan, at one time well known in the United States, is today perhaps the most unjustly neglected novelist in the English-speaking world.

If the Northerners were acting the Will of God, the Southerners were rescuing a hallowed ideal of gallantry, aristocratic freedom, fine manners and luxurious living from the materialism and vulgarity of the mercantile Northern society.

The celebration of current battles by poets who have not taken part in them has produced some of the emptiest verse that exists.

No two people ever read the same book.

I am not quite a poet but I am something of the kind.

Only the curious will learn and only the resolute will overcome the obstacles to learning. The quest quotient has always excited me more than the intelligence quotient.

The human imagination has already come to conceive the possibility of recreating human society.

I have learned to read the papers calmly and not to hate the fools I read about.

His style has the desperate jauntiness of an orchestra fiddling away for dear life on a sinking ship.

I have had a good many more uplifting thoughts, creative and expansive visions—while soaking in comfortable baths or drying myself after bracing showers—in well-equipped American bathrooms than I have ever had in any cathedral.

It may be that there is nothing more demoralizing than a small but adequate income.