Philip Rieff

"Literature teaches us what psychology cannot: the reality of the soul"

"Authenticity without tradition becomes mere self-indulgence"

"The psychological has colonized what was once the moral and spiritual"

"We confuse tolerance with indifference and call it progress"

"Education without moral formation produces clever barbarians"

"The crisis of our time is not material but spiritual, masked as psychological"

"Discipline once built character; now we call it repression"

"The sacred is that which commands us beyond our own desires"

"Modern life proceeds by the continuous therapeutic dissolution of obligation"

"We have exchanged the wisdom of ages for the opinions of the moment"

"Love cannot flourish where commitment has become optional"

"The individual isolated from tradition becomes prey to ideology"

"Reason without piety produces sophistication without wisdom"

"The family is not an obstacle to freedom but its necessary foundation"

"Culture dies when we stop believing that anything transcends our immediate gratification"

"The therapeutic view of life makes us smaller, not larger"

"Authority that cannot command respect must resort to force"

"We mistake the removal of restraint for the achievement of freedom"

"The death of dogma did not bring enlightenment but merely different dogmas"

"Manners are the outward expression of an inward sense of obligation to others"

"The modern world offers us choices but denies us meaning"

"Character is formed not by expression but by renunciation"

"We have made therapy our substitute for grace"

"The loss of the sacred leaves only the profane, endlessly circulating"

"Culture is the antidote to the chaos of unformed desire"

"Modern man seeks to cure himself of guilt without confronting what he has done"

"The therapeutic promise is that we can transcend limits; the human reality is that we must accept them"

"Literature preserves what society would rather forget"

"Authority grounded in tradition can be questioned; arbitrary authority cannot be resisted"

"The psychological explanation destroys moral accountability"