Lionel Trilling: Humanity

Lionel Trilling was American academic. Explore interesting quotes on humanity.
Lionel Trilling: 60 quotes0 likes

“Economic man and the Calvinist Christian sing to each other like voices in a fugue. The Calvinist stands alone before an almost merciless God; no human agency can help him; his church is a means to political and social organization rather than a bridge to deity, for no priest can have greater knowledge of the divine way than he himself; no friend can console him — in fact, he should distrust all men; in the same fashion, Economic Man faces a merciless world alone and unaided, his hand against every other's.”

Lionel Trilling

Source: Matthew Arnold (1939), Ch. 8: The Failure of the Middle Class

“At 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 Trilling

"Elements That Are Wanted," Partisan Review (September/October 1940)

“The definitions of humanism are many, but let us here take it to be the attitude of those men who think it an advantage to live in society, and, at that, in a complex and highly developed society, and who believe that man fulfills his nature and reaches his proper stature in this circumstance. The personal virtues which humanism cherishes are intelligence, amenity, and tolerance; the particular courage it asks for is that which is exercised in the support of these virtues. The qualities of intelligence which it chiefly prizes are modulation and flexibility.”

Lionel Trilling

Introduction
The Portable Matthew Arnold (Viking Press, 1949)

“The aspects of society that humanism most exalts are justice and continuity. That is why humanism is always being presented with a contradiction. For when it speaks of justice it holds that the human condition is absolute; yet when it speaks of continuity it implies that society is not absolute but pragmatic and even anomalous. Its intelligence dictates the removal of all that is anomalous; yet its ideal of social continuity is validated by by its perception that the effort to destroy anomaly out of hand will probably bring new and even worse anomalies, the nature of man being what it is. "Let justice be done though the heavens fall" is balanced by awareness that after the heavens fall justice will not ever be done again.”

Lionel Trilling

Introduction
The Portable Matthew Arnold (Viking Press, 1949)

“Everything which the economist takes from you in the way of life and humanity, he restores to you in the form of money and wealth.”

Lionel Trilling book Sincerity and Authenticity

Source: Sincerity and Authenticity (1972), p. 123