"One great flaw in the reforming passion is that in its eagerness to remedy social wrongs it tends to neglect, certainly to undervalue, the experience of those whose lives it wishes to improve."

--

Source : Irving Howe (1994). “A Critic's Notebook”, Harcourt

Irving Howe

#Passion Quotes #Wish Quotes #Flaws Quotes

“Somebody, after all, had to make a start. What we wrote and said is also believed by many others. They just don't dare express themselves as we did.”

Source : Statement to the Volksgerichtshof [People's Court] of Judge Roland Freisler, February 21, 1943.
“I don't happen to have a sense of humor personally, so I don't know what's funny about a character... This happens to be a feature of my life generally.”
“Adrian Mole's father was so angry that so many pepole got divorced nowadays. HE had been unhappilly married for 30 years, why should everybody else get away?”
“Living wild species are like a library of books still unread. Our heedless destruction of them is akin to burning the library without ever having read its books.”
“The desire for magic cannot be eradicated. Even the most supposedly rational people attempt to practice magic in love and war. We simultaneously possess the most primitive of brain stems and the most sophisticated of cortices. The imperatives of each coexist uneasily.”
“How many things apparently impossible have nevertheless been performed by resolute men who had no alternative but death.”
“I have a right to my anger, and I don't want anybody telling me I shouldn't be, that it's not nice to be, and that something's wrong with me because I get angry.”
“I am dominated by one thing, an irresistible, burning attraction towards the abstract. The expression of human feelings and the passions of man certainly interest me deeply, but I am less concerned with expressing the motions of the soul and mind than to render visible, so to speak, the inner flashes of intuition which have something divine in their apparent insignificance and reveal magic, even divine horizons, when they are transposed into the marvellous effects of pure plastic art.”

You may also like:

Alfred Kazin
Writer
Dwight Macdonald
Writer
Irving Kristol
Columnist
John Hollander
Poet
Lionel Trilling
Literary critic
Nathan Glazer
Sociologist
Rudyard Kipling
Writer
Ruth Wisse
Professor
William Faulkner
Writer