"The Age of Empty Freedom ... does not know that man must first through labour, industry, and art, learn how to know; but it has a certain fixed standard for all conceptions, and an established Common Sense of Mankind always ready and at hand, innate within itself and there present without trouble on its part;—and those conceptions and this Common Sense are to it the measure of the efficient and the real. It has this great advantage over the Age of Science, that it knows all things without having learned anything; and can pass judgment upon whatever comes before it at once and without hesitation,—without needing any preliminary evidence:—'That which I do not immediately comprehend by the conceptions which dwell within me, is nothing,'—says Empty Freedom."

"The effects of the automobile in the 1950s not only gave us dating, it also destroyed our communities. Resources were no longer grouped together, as walking from place to place became impossible and automobiles became a requirement for existence. Face-to-face interaction died off, and so did the habit of walking — resulting in our current obesity crisis. This doesn’t mean that cars and dating are bad — what it means is that we now live in a context to which we are not adapted."

"Philosophy—reduced, as we have seen, to philosophical discourse—develops from this point on in a different atmosphere and environment from that of ancient philosophy. In modern university philosophy, philosophy is obviously no longer a way of life, or a form of life—unless it be the form of life of a professor of philosophy."

"People discovered new energy sources – coal, then petroleum – in the nineteenth century, and then invented all sorts of new technologies to make use of this freshly released energy. Transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, lighting, heating – all were revolutionized, and the results reached deep into the lives of everyone in the industrialized world. Everybody became utterly dependent on the new gadgets; on imported, chemically fertilized food; on chemically synthesized and fossil-fuel-delivered therapeutic drugs; on the very idea of perpetual growth (after all, it would always be possible to produce more energy to fuel more transportation and manufacturing – wouldn’t it?). Well, if the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were the upside of the growth curve, th[e twenty-first] century has been the downside – the cliff. It should have been perfectly obvious to everyone that the energy sources on which they were coming to rely were exhaustible. Somehow the thought never sank in very deep."

"As Lewis Mumford … explained at length, the modern world has developed a cult of technology. We look to technology to solve basic human problems that were formerly addressed by family, community, or personal toil. Machines inform us, connect us, transport us, feed us, and entertain us. Not only do consumers love their gizmos, but manufacturers do, too, since gadgets produce profits; so do workers and politicians, who benefit from jobs created by industrial expansion. Shopping for the latest smartwatch, drone, or mosquito zapper is a sacred ritual of consumerism. And we worship inventors and industrialists like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk."

"Certainly, what nowadays we understand by personality is something quite different from what the biographers and historians of earlier times meant by it. For them, and especially for the writers of those days who had a distinct taste for biography, the essence of a personality seems to have been deviance, abnormality, uniqueness, in fact all too often the pathological. We moderns, on the other hand, do not even speak of major personalities until we encounter men who have gone beyond all original and idiosyncratic qualities to achieve the greatest possible integration into the generality, the greatest possible service to the supra personal."