4 Lionel Trilling Quotes on Culture

Lionel Trilling quotes on culture

4. Somewhere in the child, somewhere in the adult, there is a hard, irreducible, stubborn core of biological urgency, and biological necessity, and biological reason that culture cannot reach and that reserves the right, which sooner or later it will exercise, to judge the culture and resist and revise it.

7. If one defends the bourgeois, philistine virtues, one does not defend them merely from the demonism or bohemianism of the artist but from the present bourgeoisie itself.

14. Arnold must have for us the something of the character of what we nowadays have taken to calling a 'culture hero': that is, a man who gives himself in full submission and sacrifice to his historical moment in order to comprehend and control the elements which that moment brings.

22. Our culture peculiarly honors the act of blaming, which it takes as the sign of virtue and intellect.