Lionel Trilling Quotes

The pulpit and the press have many commonplaces denouncing the thirst for wealth, but if men should take these moralists at their word, and leave off aiming to be rich, the moralists would rush to rekindle at all hazards this love of power in the people, lest civilization should be undone.

Sharpness is a bourgeois concept

I'm compared to Kerouac, I suppose, because he traveled and rejected middle-class values, but the similarities end there.

It did not occur to us that the Marxists' solution was fraudulent or that their vision was distorted, that whatever the wrongs in our society it was not the ideology of theirs that will cure them.

In olden days a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking but now, God knows, anything goes.

Marxism is always open, always critical, always self-critical.

When I was little, my parents really only wanted me to be a scientist or a doctor; they had never even heard of law school. I think even these days if you were to tell your mother you want to be a fashion designer, or an artist or a writer, a lot of Asian parents would be alarmed because they don't think that's a secure career.

A society needs famous people; the question is whom it chooses for that role. Any criticism of its choice is by implication a criticism of that society.

If every one of those good words - liberty, equality, fraternity, democracy, human rights - has been called "bourgeois", what on earth does that leave for us?

The academic Left has a long history of taking the idea of 'false consciousness' seriously.

I am still moved by passages of Marx: the 'Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right,' for example, where, after the famous line about religion being 'the opium of the people,' he goes on to call it 'the heart of a heartless world.'

Marxism is a success because it fuses the two inconsistent strains in Western thought - moral skepticism and moral indignation - and makes them complements in the attack against existing society.

Every man has been brought up with the idea that decent women don't pop in and out of bed; he has always been told by his mother that "nice girls don't." He finds, of course, when he gets older that this may be untrue-but only in a certain section of society.

I hold that such a question can never arise except in a society of cannibals.

Long ago life was clean, sex was bad and obscene, and the rich were so mean. Stately homes for the Lords, croquet lawns, village greens, Victoria was my queen.

It is the corpse of the bourgeoisie that separates us. With us, it is that class that is the carrier of the chromosome of banality.

Romance is the douche of the bourgeoisie.

The intelligentsia ...was kept busy embroidering white stitches on the philosophical and ecclesiastical vestments of the bourgeoisie - that old and filthy fabric besmeared with the blood of toiling masses.

And Burke, could he see our century, never would concede that a consumption-society, so near to suicide, is the end for which Providence has prepared man.

Tradition was safety; change was danger.

The core of the Marxist critique of capitalism is that although the individual capitalist is rational (as liberals assume), the capitalist system itself is irrational.

I feel about lending a book the way most fathers feel about their daughters living with a man out of wedlock.

Charles Murray, however, clearly believes that being able to cure fatal diseases is more important than some other things and that Rembrandt was a greater artist than your local sidewalk cartoon sketcher. Most people might regard this as obvious common sense but some of the intelligentsia may be seething with resentment at seeing their pet fetishes ignored.

There is an old joke about socialism as the synthesis of the highest achievements of the whole human history to date: from prehistoric societies it took primitivism; from the Ancient world it took slavery; from medieval society brutal domination; from capitalism exploitation; and from socialism the name.

Ladies and gentlemen, if some of the leading artists in a civilization see a man urinating in another man's mouth and see composition and lighting and do not see their civilization being pissed upon, we are in trouble.