Edmund Wilson
FameRank: 4

"Edmund Wilson" was an American writer, literary criticism/literary and social criticism/social critic, and man of letters.

If you enjoy these quotes, be sure to check out other famous critics! More Edmund Wilson on Wikipedia.

There is nothing more demoralizing than a small but adequate income.

Marxism is the opium of the intellectuals.

At 60 the sexual preoccupation, when it hits you, seems sometimes sharper, as if it were an elderly malady, like gout.

If I could only remember that the days were, not bricks to be laid row on row, to be built into a solid house, where one might dwell in safety and peace, but only food for the fires of the heart.

No matter how thoroughly and searchingly we may have scrutinized works of literature from the historical and biographical point of view, we must be able to tell good from bad, the first-rate from the second-rate. We shall otherwise not write literary criticism at all, but merely social or political history as reflected in literary texts, or psychological case histories from past eras.

The cruelest thing that has happened to Lincoln since he was shot by Booth was to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg.

The product of the scientific imagination is a new vision of relations -- like that of artistic imagination.

Real genius of moral insight is a motor which will start any engine.

The human imagination has already come to conceive the possibility of recreating human society.