On Lionel Trilling

From Jacques Barzun, "Remembering Lionel Trilling," in A Jacques Barzun Reader, ed. Michael Murray:

The only things worth cherishing in life are necessarily destroyed by ideology and coercion from their first onset. In other words, variety and complexity are but different names for possibility; and without possibility—freedom for the unplanned and indefinite—life becomes a savorless round of predictable acts. There is then no point to literature or thought; there is in fact no literature and no thought, but a mere ideological echo of a diminished life.