Best social & literature Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings

“Literature is at once the cause and the effect of social progress. It deepens our natural sensibilities, and strengthens by exercise our intellectual capacities. It stores up the accumulated experience of the race, connecting Past and Present into a conscious unity; and with this store it feeds successive generations, to be fed in turn by them.”

“Universities are an example of organizations dominated wholly by intellectuals; yet, outside pure science, they have not been an optimal milieu for the unfolding of creative talents. In neither art, music, literature, technology and social theory, nor planning have the Universities figured as originators or as seedbeds of new talents and energies.”

Art Literature Energy Social Technology Creative Talent Example Theory Pure Organization University Planning Unfolding Optimal Art Music Milieu New Talent Social Theory

Author:Eric Hoffer

“No human society is too primitive to have some kind of literature. The only thing is that primitive literature hasn't yet become distinguished from other aspects of life: it's still embedded in religion, magic and social ceremonies.”

Humans Kind Stills Literature Social Magic Aspect Primitive Ceremony Distinguished Human Society Embedded Aspects Of Life

Book:Educated Imagination and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1933-1962

Source: Educated Imagination and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1933-1962

“What was needed was a literary theory which, while preserving the formalist bent of New Criticism, its dogged attention to literature as aesthetic object rather than social practice, would make something a good deal more systematic and 'scientific' out of all this. The answer arrived in 1957, in the shape of the Canadian Northrop Fryes mighty 'totalization' of all literary genres, Anatomy of Criticism .”

Literature Social Answers Deals Attention Practice Objects Theory Needed Shapes Criticism Genre Aesthetic Bent Systematic Anatomy Literary Theory Literary Genre

Book:Literary Theory: An Introduction

Source: Literary Theory: An Introduction

“If history could prove and teach us anything, it would be the private ownership of the means of production as a necessary requisite of civilization and material well-being. All civilizations have up to now been based on private property. Only nations committed to the principle of private property have risen above penury and produced science, art, and literature. There is no experience to show that any other social system could provide mankind with any of the achievements of civilization.”

“Language and, presumably, literature are more ancient and inevitable, more durable than any form of social organization. The revulsion, irony, or indifference often expressed by literature toward the state is essentially the reaction of the permanent-better yet, the infinite-against the temporary, against the finite.”

States Form Literature Language Social Organization Infinite Ancient Reactions Inevitable Permanent Irony Indifference Temporary Finite Revulsion Social Organization

Author:Joseph Brodsky

“I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offense. ... Everyone who contributes to the 'too much' of literature is doing grave social injury.”

Literature Social Too Much Productions Conviction Graves Injury Offense

Author:George Eliot

“Never can a new idea move within the law. It matters not whether that idea pertains to political and social changes or to any other domain of human thought and expression - to science, literature, music; in fact, everything that makes for freedom and joy and beauty must refuse to move within the law. How can it be otherwise? The law is stationary, fixed, mechanical, 'a chariot wheel' which grinds all alike without regard to time, place and condition, without ever taking into account cause and effect, without ever going into the complexity of the human soul.”

“I am not ashamed to admit that I belong to those who fantasize that literature is capable of bringing new horizons and new perspectives--philosophical, religious, aesthetical and even social.”

Literature Social Religious Perspective Capable Philosophical Ashamed Horizon New Perspective New Horizons

Author:Isaac Bashevis Singer

“The storyteller and poet of our time, as in any other time, must be an entertainer of the spirit in the full sense of the word, not just a preacher of social or political ideals. There is no paradise for bored readers and no excuse for tedious literature that does not intrigue the reader, uplift him, give him the joy and the escape that true art always grants.”

Source: The collected stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer

“But if there is such a thing as social commitment in literature, I think it must manifest itself in a reader's awareness of the human condition, in the writer's touching some common nerve ending. I think this kind of social commitment, like a lady's slip, should be there but it must not show.”

Ifs Thinking Should Humans Kind Shows Literature Social Common Conditions Awareness Reader Commitment Nerves Manifest Touching Slips Human Condition

Author:Bel Kaufman

“Words have their genealogy, their history, their economy, their literature, their art and music, as too they have their weddings and divorces, their successes and defeats, their fevers, their undiagnosable ailments, their sudden deaths. They also have their moral and social distinctions.”

Art Literature Social Moral Economy Defeat Divorce Distinction Fever Genealogy Art And Music Ailments Sudden Death

Book:A Matter of Life and Death

Source: A Matter of Life and Death

“Most of the great works of juvenile literature are subversive in one way or another: they express ideas and emotions not generally approved of or even recognized at the time; they make fun of honored figures and piously held beliefs; and they view social pretenses with clear-eyed directness, remarking - as in Andersen's famous tale - that the emperor has no clothes.”

Way Ideas Literature Belief Fun Social Views Emotion Clear Figures Clothes Tales One Way Honored Great Work Emperor Pretense Approved Subversive Juvenile Children's Literature

Author:Alison Lurie

“I do think that part of literature's job is to comment on and participate in the social issues of the time.”

Thinking Jobs Literature Social Issues Comment Social Issues

Author:Linda Sue Park

“Like many works of literature, Hollywood chooses for its villains people who strive for social dominance through the pursuit of wealth, prestige, and power. But the ordinary business of capitalism is much more egalitarian: It's about finding meaning and enjoyment in work and production.”

People Literature Social Wealth Findings Ordinary Capitalism Hollywood Strive Productions Pursuit Enjoyment Villain Dominance Prestige Egalitarianism Pursuit Of Wealth

Author:Alex Tabarrok

“These capacities for randomness may have been amplified into human creativity through sexual and social selection.”

Humans May Has Beens Poetry Literature Social Creativity Capacity Selection Randomness

Author:Geoffrey Miller

“Life's so ordinary that literature has to deal with the exceptional. Exceptional talent, power, social position, wealth.... Dramabegins where there's freedom of choice. And freedom of choice begins when social or psychological conditions are exceptional. That's why the inhabitants of imaginative literature have always been recruited from the pages of Who's Who.”

Art Reality Artist Choices Literature Social Wealth Deals Conditions Talent Position Pages Ordinary Psychological Realism Exceptional Imaginative Freedom Of Choice

Book:The collected works of Aldous Huxley

Source: The collected works of Aldous Huxley

“Art has always been this--pure interrogation, rhetorical question less the rhetoric--whatever else it may have been obliged by social reality to appear.”

May Has Beens Art Reality Literature Social Pure Rhetoric Obliged Rhetorical Interrogation Rhetorical Question

Book:Disjecta: miscellaneous writings and a dramatic fragment

Source: Disjecta: miscellaneous writings and a dramatic fragment

“The weakness of modern tragedy[is that] transgression against the social code is made to bring destruction, as though the social code worked our irrevocable fate.”

Made Literature Social Fate Modern Weakness Destruction Tragedy Code Transgression Irrevocable Modern Tragedy

Book:Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays

Source: Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays

“I was once a graduate student in Victorian literature, and I believe as the Victorian novelists did, that a novel isn't simply a vehicle for private expression, but that it also exists for social examination. I firmly believe this.”

Believe Literature I Believe Social Novel Students Expression Novelists Graduates Vehicle Examination Victorian Graduate Students

Author:Margaret Atwood

“Many of us who read the literature of social science as laymen are conscious of being admitted at a door which bears the watchword "scientific objectivity" and of emerging at another door which looks out upon a variety of projects for changing, renovating, or revolutionizing society. In consequence, we feel the need of a more explicit account of how the student of society passes from facts to values or statements of policy.”

Source: In defense of tradition: collected shorter writings of Richard M. Weaver, 1929-1963

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