Being a Jew is like walking in the wind or swimming: you are touched at all points and conscious everywhere.
Lionel TrillingUnless 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 TrillingI find righteous denunciations of the present state of the language no less dismaying than the present state of the language.
Lionel TrillingAt the bottom of at least popular Marxism there has always been a kind of disgust with humanity as it is and a perfect faith in humanity as it is to be.
Lionel TrillingAny historian of the literature of the modern age will take virtually for granted the adversary intention, the actually subversive intention, that characterizes modern writing - he will perceive its clear purpose of detaching the reader from the habits of thought and feeling that the larger culture imposes, of giving him a ground and a vantage point from which to judge and condemn, and perhaps revise, the culture that produces him.
Lionel Trilling