Civil Society is a cluster of institutions and associations strong enough to prevent tyranny, but which are, none the less, entered and left freely, rather than imposed by birth or sustained by awesome ritual. You can join the Labour Party without slaughtering a sheep.

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

It is nationalism which engenders nations, and not the other way round.

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

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.

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