Philip Rieff

"All genuine culture is an act of renunciation."

"We have lost the ability to transmit that which we have not chosen."

"The modern self is a perpetual adolescent."

"True freedom is the freedom to accept necessity."

"We are the first civilization to seek survival without purpose."

"Culture requires the willingness to deny the self."

"The intellectual age has become an age of mental barbarism."

"Every prohibition is an investment in meaning."

"We have made the pursuit of happiness into the flight from meaning."

"The transcendent is that which cannot be managed."

"Modernism is the systematic destruction of every inherited form."

"We celebrate the dismantling of the very structures that enabled our thought."

"The self without tradition is a self without substance."

"Culture dies when negation becomes total."

"We have replaced wisdom with information."

"The age of faith was not an age of credulity but of intelligibility."

"Art without meaning is entertainment."

"We are learning to be free in ways that destroy freedom."

"The family is the enemy of total mobilization."

"Authority divorced from tradition becomes mere coercion."

"We confuse the breaking of chains with the achieving of freedom."

"Every culture is built on renunciation and memory."

"The therapeutic age is the age of permanent adolescence."

"Culture is the medium through which we transmit our deepest values to the next generation."

"The therapeutic mindset has replaced moral authority in modern society."

"We have substituted the language of healing for the language of judgment."

"Art survives when it embodies something beyond mere self-expression."

"The death of God has left us searching for meaning in smaller and smaller places."

"Commitment requires the willingness to be bound by something greater than oneself."

"Modern man has confused freedom with the absence of all restraint."