The Pursuit of Loneliness Quotes

“We fear storms and wild beasts, but we do not censor them. If we must guard ourselves from evil influences we thereby admit their seductive appeal.”
― Philip Slater, The Pursuit of Loneliness: American Culture at the Breaking Point

“At a conservative estimate, there are probably a million men and women in their twenties and thirties who would happily work long hours doing what most needs to be done, if they were paid something for it.”
― Philip Slater, The Pursuit of Loneliness: American Culture at the Breaking Point

“Spockian parents feel it’s their responsibility to make their child into the most all-around perfect adult possible, and although what this leads to may look like “permissiveness,” it’s actually more totalitarian, for the child no longer has a private sphere. His entire being has been taken over by parental aspirations.

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― Philip Slater, The Pursuit of Loneliness: American Culture at the Breaking Point

“an excess of individualism thrives in the isolated family, where inordinate Oedipal pressure generates extreme narcissistic hunger, inner futility, stressful self-making, ferocious and disabling competition, and a “servility toward technology” which aims to solve the problems generated by individualism and rootlessness in the first place. At the same time, unbridled individualists try to compensate for their centrifugal tendency by delegating authority upward. Unable to find social solidarity horizontally, through cooperation, they search for it vertically, through authoritarian imposition.”
― Philip Slater, The Pursuit of Loneliness: American Culture at the Breaking Point