“Every neurosis is a primitive form of legal proceeding in which the accused carries on the prosecution, imposes judgment and executes the sentence: all to the end that someone else should not perform the same process.”
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Every neurosis is a primitive form of legal proceeding in which the accused carries on the prosecution, imposes judgment and executes the sentence: all to the end that someone else should not perform the same process.
Lionel Trilling 
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This is the great vice of academicism, that it is concerned with ideas rather than with thinking.
Lionel Trilling
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It is possible that the contemplation of cruelty will not make us humane but cruel; that the reiteration of the badness of our spiritual condition will make us consent to it.
Lionel Trilling
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We are all ill: but even a universal sickness implies an idea of health.
Lionel Trilling
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Our culture peculiarly honors the act of blaming, which it takes as the sign of virtue and intellect.
Lionel Trilling
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