Philip Rieff

"Every culture is a defense against the chaos of desire."

"The intellectual's task is to maintain unpopular truths."

"We confuse liberation with disintegration."

"The family is the repository of cultural memory."

"Authority is not opposed to freedom but necessary to it."

"The transgressive becomes routine; the routine becomes invisible."

"We are trying to build culture on the ruins of religion."

"Depth requires discipline; modernity abhors both."

"The self is not authentic but constructed through commitment."

"Every tradition is a refusal of something."

"We have mistaken symptom relief for genuine healing."

"The age of faith has become the age of belief in belief."

"Culture is the crystallization of human refusal."

"Meaning cannot be created; it can only be inherited and transmitted."

"We have replaced confession with analysis."

"The modern person seeks meaning without accepting limitation."

"Art that serves the self serves nothing."

"The therapeutic state is the final form of tyranny."

"We worship freedom while fleeing from the burden of choice."

"The intellectual must learn to resist the spirit of the age."

"All culture is the sublimation of appetite."

"The death of God is followed by the death of culture."

"We have made the forbidden into the merely unconventional."

"Commitment is the price of both meaning and suffering."

"The modernist dream is the dream of culture without content."

"Every tradition begins with a refusal to do otherwise."

"We mistake expansion for growth."

"The sacred is that which cannot be rationalized."

"Authority without tradition is brutality."

"The therapeutic mentality teaches us to love ourselves to death."