To shoot a man because one disagrees with his interpretation of Darwin or Hegel is a sinister tribute to the supremacy of ideas in human affairs — but a tribute nevertheless.
George SteinerWomen began their inner emancipation by their access to literature, by access to the world through books; an access they could not have socially or politically, or of course economically, in the world at large.
George SteinerTo a degree which is difficult to determine, the esoteric impulse in twentieth-century music, literature and the arts reflects calculation. It looks to the flattery of academic and hermeneutic notice. Reciprocally, the academy turns towards that which appears to require its exegetic, cryptographic skills.
George SteinerNothing in a language is less translatable than its modes of understatement.
George SteinerWhat worthwhile book after the Pentateuch has been written by a committee?
George SteinerThe age of the book is almost gone.
George SteinerThere is something terribly wrong with a culture inebriated by noise and gregariousness.
George SteinerWhen the modern scholar cites from a classic text, the quotation seems to burn a hole in his own drab page.
George SteinerLanguage can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.
George SteinerThe capacity for imaginative reflex, for moral risk in any human being is not limitless; on the contrary, it can be rapidly absorbed by fictions, and thus the cry in the poem may come to sound louder, more urgent, more real than the cry in the street outside. The death in the novel may move us more potently than the death in the next room.
George SteinerIf future society assumes the contours foretold by Marxism, if the jungle of our cities turns to the polis of man and the dreams of anger are made real, the representative art will be high comedy. Art will be the laughter of intelligence, as it is in Plato, in Mozart, in Stendhal.
George SteinerThe immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion.
George SteinerFor many human beings, religion has been the music which they believe in.
George Steiner