Quotes from Philip Rieff

The most complex analyses grow beautifully simple as they become public objects.

Religious man was born to be saved, psychological man is born to be pleased.

Psychological man may be going nowhere, but he aims to achieve a certain speed and certainty in going. Like his predecessor, the man of the market economy, he understands morality as that which is conducive to increased activity. The important thing is to keep going.

In a world without meaningful authority, all "acts" are coercive.

Where there is nothing sacred, there is nothing.

Whether or not a monarch or a mass leader has great executive ability or power, modern politics suggests that his primary function may well be psychological; he acts as a center around which otherwise disturbed lives can be organized.

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

Freud is the least confused of modern minds because he has no message; he accepts contradiction, and builds his psychology on it.

In the materialist conception, mind is the agent of the body; in the Freudian conception, as it gradually emerged through these early years of uncertainty, the body exists as a symptom of mental demands.

The faith instinct…simply cannot be killed. That 'simply cannot' means that we simply cannot not live—cannot live as if life were meaningless, without purpose; as if life were merely material or mechanical or not spiritual. Such an effort in its deadly futility represents a historical ending time, a time just before the faith instinct will show itself again.

A deconstructed text is tantamount to a forgery.

Culture and sacred order are inseparable... No culture has ever preserved itself where there is not a registration of sacred order.

Man is tied to the weight of his own past, and even by a great therapeutic labor little more can be accomplished than a shifting of the burden.

Religion may have been the original cure; Freud reminds us that it was also the original disease.

Beyond the wounds of the child and the scars of the man, there is something in the heart of love itself that makes love pathetic.

Scholarship is polite argument.