"The office is to the modern world what the cloister was to medieval Christendom: a chaste arena with an unrivalled capacity to excite desire .If these two institutions have imposed harsh penalties on those who display signs of transgressive behaviour, it is because each is, or was, the locus of its society’s most cherished values: the teachings of Christ on the one hand, and money on the other. Money is to the office as God was to the nunnery."
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Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (2009), p. 262
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Modernity
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Modernity
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