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

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.

A cleric who loses his faith abandons his calling; a philosopher who loses his redefines his subject.

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

Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness; it invents nations where they do not exist.

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

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