Rat/culture/fiction

Famous quotes containing the words rat, culture and/or fiction:

    When a rat crosses a street, everyone shouts and beats it.
    Chinese proverb.

    Any historian of the literature of the modern age will take virtually for granted the adversary intention, the actually subversive intention, that characterizes modern writing—he will perceive its clear purpose of detaching the reader from the habits of thought and feeling that the larger culture imposes, of giving him a ground and a vantage point from which to judge and condemn, and perhaps revise, the culture that produces him.
    Lionel Trilling (1905–1975)

    Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today—but the core of science fiction, its essence ... has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.
    Isaac Asimov (1920–1992)