America was born modern; it did not have to achieve modernity, nor did it have modernity thrust upon it.

Industrial Society is not merely one containing 'industry,' large-scale productive units capable of supplying man's material needs in a way which can eliminate poverty: it is also a society in which knowledge plays a part wholly different from that which it played in earlier social forms, and which indeed possesses a quite different type of knowledge. Modern science is inconceivable outside an industrial society: but modern industrial society is equally inconceivable without modern science. Roughly, science is the mode of cognition of industrial society, and industry is the ecology of science.

People are even more reluctant to admit that man explains nothing, than they were to admit that God explains nothing.

Nowledge which... transcends the bounds, the prejudices and prejudgements of any one society and culture is not an illusion but, on the contrary, a glorious and luminous reality. Just how it was achieved remains subject to debate.

Ideas, and even the detection of errors, require more than care and caution.

The production of obscurity in Paris compares to the production of motor cars in Detroit in the great period of American industry.

America was born modern; it did not have to achieve modernity, nor did it have modernity thrust upon it.