Philip Rieff

"Authority is not the enemy of freedom but its necessary condition"

"The individual disconnected from culture becomes unmoored from meaning"

"We have made tolerance our highest virtue and thereby rendered ourselves defenseless"

"The search for authenticity apart from tradition leads only to a deeper inauthenticity"

"Culture is the transmission of what is sacred across generations"

"Modern life is characterized by the expansion of choice and the contraction of meaning"

"The therapeutic promise of liberation has left us more bound than ever to our appetites"

"Truth cannot be experienced through psychology alone but requires wisdom and grace"

"The family is not an institution to be transcended but the foundation of all meaning"

"We mistake the criticism of authority for the achievement of justice"

"Character emerges not from self-expression but from self-renunciation"

"The modern world has freed us from the chains of tradition only to bind us to the tyranny of the present moment"

"Meaning requires a sense that something is at stake, something beyond ourselves"

"The attack on culture is always, ultimately, an attack on meaning itself"

"Love is the willingness to be bound by something larger than oneself"

"We have become so enlightened that we have lost the capacity for awe"

"The therapeutic view of life offers comfort but destroys dignity"

"Culture is the forgetting of origins, the domestication of the sacred."

"The therapeutic is the enemy of the transcendent."

"Modern man has lost the ability to live without justifying his existence."

"Interdicts are the grammar of culture."

"We are living in the first age of permanent transition."

"The Christian era has ended; we now live in the post-Christian age."

"Deathwork is the refusal of all binding commitments."

"Authority without culture is mere power."

"The modern self is a bundle of appetites with no organizing principle."

"Art once served the gods; now it serves the appetites."

"Meaning requires negation, the ability to say no."

"Culture depends on the ability to transmit inhibitions."

"The therapeutic mentality is the corruption of morality."