Quotes About Lionel Trilling

Even in The Liberal Imagination, a book with a clear polemical purpose, ambivalence about the educative value of literature lurks in the background of many of the essays.

In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation.

We are all ill: but even a universal sickness implies an idea of health.

We are all ill: but even a universal sickness implies an idea of health.

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.

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

Unless we insist that politics is imagination and mind," as he puts it in the essay on Partisan Review, "we will learn that imagination and mind are politics, and of a kind we will not like.