Proper Function

Famous quotes containing the words proper and/or function:

“Religion is by no means a proper subject of conversation in mixed company; it should only be treated among a very few people of learning, for mutual instruction. It is too awful and respectable a subject to become a familiar one.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)

“The function of literature, through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and the high authority of the self in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive.”
—Lionel Trilling (1905–1975)