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Reason cannot save us, nothing can; but reason can mitigate the cruelty of living.

— Philip Rieff Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (1959)

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More quotes by Philip Rieff

Analytic therapy is thus a form of re-education; Freud specifically called it that.

The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud (1966)

In the age of psychologizing, clarity about oneself supersedes devotion to an ideal as the model of right conduct.

The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud (1966)

This total rejection of the religious question gives even Marxism a pious look.

The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud (1966)

The answer to all questions of “what for?” is “more.”

The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud (1966)

Surely the romantic and now permanent revolution against the ancient regime of reason is against a regime largely invented by the revolutionaries themselves.

Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (1959)

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The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

H. P. Lovecraft The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.

Kenneth Boulding to Kenneth Boulding in: United States. Congress. House (1973)

The greater part of humanity is too much harassed and fatigued by the struggle with want, to rally itself for a new and sterner struggle with error.

Friedrich Schiller On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794)

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

George Bernard Shaw Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Philip Rieff (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.