It is of the essence of imaginative culture that it transcends the limits both of the naturally possible and of the morally acceptable.

It is of the essence of imaginative culture that it transcends the limits both of the naturally possible and of the morally acceptable.

Culture's essential service to a religion is to destroy intellectual idolatry, the recurrent tendency in religion to replace the object of its worship with its present understanding and forms of approach to that object.

Those who are concerned with the arts are often asked questions, not always sympathetic ones, about the use or value of what they are doing. It is probably impossible to answer such questions directly, or at any rate to answer the people who ask them.

Nobody is capable of of free speech unless he knows how to use language, and such knowledge is not a gift: it has to learned and worked at.

A snowflake is probably quite unconscious of forming a crystal, but what it does may be worth study even if we are willing to leave its inner mental processes alone.

I don't see how the study of language and literature can be separated from the question of free speech, which we all know is fundamental to our society.