Quotes from Edmund Wilson

The wars fought by human beings are stimulated as a rule primarily by the same instincts as the voracity of a sea slug.

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

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

The cruellest thing that has happened to Lincoln since he was shot by Booth has been to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg.

We tended to imagine Canada as a kind of vast hunting preserve convenient to the United States.

Whenever we engage in a war or move in on some other country, it is always to liberate somebody.

We have earned the slogan, "Yanks, go home!"

In the arts as in the sciences a certain freedom for experimentation is necessary: one must allow a good deal of apparently gratuitous, and even empty or ridiculous work, if one wants to get masterpieces.

If I could only remember that the days were, not bricks to be laid row on row, to be built into a solid house, where one might dwell in safety and peace, but only food for the fires of the heart.

I find more and more that I am a man of the 1920s. I still expect something exciting. Drinks, animated conversation, gaiety: the uninhibited exchange of ideas.

No hay dos personas que lean el mismo libro.

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

She was one of those women whose features are not perfect and who in their moments of dimness may not seem even pretty, but who, excited by the blood or the spirit, become almost supernaturally beautiful.

There is nothing more demoralizing than a small but adequate income.

Marxism is the opium of the intellectuals

What a gulf between the self which experiences and the self which describes experience.

The cruelest thing that has happened to Lincoln since being shot by Booth was to have fallen into the hands of Carl Sandburg.

No two persons ever read the same book

In his novels from beginning to end, Dickens is making the same point always: that to the English governing classes the people they govern are not real.

Capitalism has run its course, and we shall have to look for other ideals than the ones that capitalism has encouraged.

While the romantic individualist deludes himself with unrealizable fantasies, in the attempt to evade bourgeois society, and only succeeds in destroying himself, he lets humanity fall a victim to the industrial-commercial processes, which, unimpeded by his dreaming, go on with their deadly work.

He believes, but he does not believe: the impossibility of believing is the impossibility which he accepts most reluctantly, but still it is there with the other impossibilities of this world which is too full of weeping for a child to understand.

No two person, ever read the same book.

No two persons ever read the same book".