Views
George Steiner is regarded as a polymath and often credited with recasting the role of the critic by exploring art and thought unbounded by national frontiers or academic disciplines. He advocates generalisation over specialisation, and insists that the notion of being literate must encompass knowledge of both arts and sciences. Steiner, who is Jewish, rejects Jewish nationalism and is a critic of Israel.
Central to Steiner's thinking, he has stated, "is my astonishment, naïve as it seems to people, that you can use human speech both to love, to build, to forgive, and also to torture, to hate, to destroy and to annihilate."
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Famous quotes containing the word views:
“A foreign minister, I will maintain it, can never be a good man of business if he is not an agreeable man of pleasure too. Half his business is done by the help of his pleasures: his views are carried on, and perhaps best, and most unsuspectedly, at balls, suppers, assemblies, and parties of pleasure; by intrigues with women, and connections insensibly formed with men, at those unguarded hours of amusement.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these books. Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the book-worm.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The absolute things, the last things, the overlapping things, are the truly philosophic concerns; all superior minds feel seriously about them, and the mind with the shortest views is simply the mind of the more shallow man.”
—William James (1842–1910)