The diminution of the reality of class, however socially desirable in many respects, seems to have the practical effect of diminishing our ability to see people in their difference and specialness.
Lionel TrillingThe function of literature, through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and the high authority of the self in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive.
Lionel TrillingI find righteous denunciations of the present state of the language no less dismaying than the present state of the language.
Lionel Trilling