Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by George Steiner (American Culture Critic)

George Steiner (1929–2020,) fully Francis George Steiner, was a Franco-American literary critic, philosopher, novelist, and academic. He wrote broadly about the intense moral engagement between language, literature and society, and the consequence of the Holocaust.

Born in Paris of Austrian-Jewish parents, Steiner was educated at Chicago, Harvard, and Balliol College-Oxford. He taught at Princeton (1956–60) and Cambridge (s.1961.) He also taught English and comparative literature at the University of Geneva (1974–94) and St Anne’s College-Oxford (1994–95.)

Steiner identified literature as a part of a broader social and cultural context. He made intelligent and controversial reflections on the role and the nature of language and its influences. His publications include The Death of Tragedy (1960,) Language and Silence (1967,) After Babel (1975; regarded as his most important work,) Antigones (1984,) and Real Presences (1989.) Steiner donated his personal papers to Churchill College-Cambridge in 2000.

More: Wikipedia READ: Works by George Steiner

Men are accomplices to that which leaves them indifferent.
George Steiner
Topics: Indifference, Apathy

The violent illiteracies of the graffiti, the clenched silence of the adolescent, the nonsense cries from the stage-happening, are resolutely strategic. The insurgent and the freak-out have broken off discourse with a cultural system which they despise as a cruel, antiquated fraud. They will not bandy words with it. Accept, even momentarily, the conventions of literate linguistic exchange, and you are caught in the net of the old values, of the grammars that can condescend or enslave.
George Steiner
Topics: Society

The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion.
George Steiner
Topics: Biography, Legacy

Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.
George Steiner
Topics: Language

There is something terribly wrong with a culture inebriated by noise and gregariousness.
George Steiner

The new sound-sphere is global. It ripples at great speed across languages, ideologies, frontiers and races. The economics of this musical Esperanto is staggering. Rock and pop breed concentric worlds of fashion, setting and life-style. Popular music has brought with it sociologies of private and public manner, of group solidarity. The politics of Eden come loud.
George Steiner
Topics: Music

It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past. Each new historical era mirrors itself in the picture and active mythology of its past or of a past borrowed from other cultures. It tests its sense of identity, of regress or new achievement against that past.
George Steiner
Topics: Past, The Past

Books – the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity.
George Steiner
Topics: Books

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 Steiner
Topics: Dissent

The journalistic vision sharpens to the point of maximum impact every event, every individual and social configuration; but the honing is uniform.
George Steiner
Topics: Media

Words that are saturated with lies or atrocity, do not easily resume life.
George Steiner
Topics: Lying, Deception/Lying, Lies

To many men… the miasma of peace seems more suffocating than the bracing air of war.
George Steiner
Topics: Peace

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