Saturday Surprise [by David Lehman]

Here are five sentences that I didn't write. I proffer them not only because of the formidable intellect behind them but also because of the insights into our culture and into human nature. Some, if we consider when they were written, are of prophetic power.

To play, identify the author (and name the specific source or publication) in the comments field. Or don't. Just think about these observations. I will identify the auithor before the weekend ends. The art illustrating this piece is a red herring with a red cape.

"Somewhere in the child, somewhere in the adult, there is a hard, irreducible, stubborn core of biological urgency, and biological necessity, and biological reason that culture cannot reach and that reserves the right, which sooner or later it will exercise, to judge the culture and resist and revise it. "

"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."

“It is now life and not art that requires the willing suspension of disbelief.”

"We who are liberal and progressive know that the poor are our equals in every sense except that of being equal to us."

“We are at heart so profoundly anarchistic that the only form of state we can imagine living in is Utopian; and so cynical that the only Utopia we can believe in is authoritarian.”

Comments

[Emily Fragos]

Alexis de Tocqueville (Democracy In America)???

[Jim Periconi]

Antonio Gramsci. But the typos in the first sentence are the translators, not Antonio‘s.

[gap]

Mostly Lionel Trilling, but the second quote ("Everything which the economist takes... ") is straight from Marx.

[jim c]

Red Skelton.

[David Lehman]

Thanks for the guesses -- and special thanks to Jim Periconi for pointing out the translator's typos, now corrected. All the answers were wonderful, but only gap has the right ones. Karl Marx wrote "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." Trilling quotes the sentence in "Sincereity and Authenticity." Tricky of me, I know. When I was his research assistant, and "The Birth of Tragedy" came up, Trilling quipped "Nitzsche never did betray the heart that loved him."

[Mark C. Minton]

Ok,who wrote these prescient words?:

"The vast accumulation of knowledge-- or at least information--deposited by the 19th Century have been responsible for an equally great ignorance. When there is so much to be known, when there are so many fields of knowledge in which the same words are used with different meanings, when everyone knows a little about a great many things, it becomes increasingly difficult for anyone to know whether he knows what he is talking about or not. And when we do not know, or when we do not know enough, we tend always to substitute emotions for thoughts."

HINT: The quote is not from a political scientist or Henry Kissinger-- but a poet. Actually, the cadence and phrasing should give it away, even if you don't know the quotation!

Mark

[Mark C. Minton]

Or to quote another poet of long ago who perfectly understands,say, Putin, or even our beloved Clarence Thomas, who said this:

" The idea of a golden age is inherent in the tradition of every people, which proves nothing except that people are never satisfied with the present, and since their experience gives them little hope for the future, they adorn the irrevocable past with all the flowers of their imagination."

HINT: The speaker understands Putin!

Mark

[David Lehman]

Thank you, Mark. The first of the quotes ("The vast accumulation of knowledge-- or at least information--deposited by the 19th Century have been responsible for an equally great ignorance," etc) has to be T. S. Eliot. But I don't know the second. Tolstoy? Edmund Wilson?

[Mark Minton]

Thanks for responding. The first quote is indeed from T.S. Eliot. The second,from someone who looked into Putin's soul (if he has one) long before this latest version of Russian reaction was born, is Alexander Pushkin.