Hell is out of fashion--institutional hells at any rate. The populated infernos of the 20th century are more private affairs, the ...gaps between the bars are the sutures of one's own skull.... A valid hell is one from which there is a possibility of redemption, even if this is never achieved, the dungeons of an architecture of grace whose spires point to some kind of heaven. The institutional hells of the present century are reached with one-way tickets, marked Nagasaki and Buchenwald, worlds of terminal horror even more final than the grave.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When theology erodes and organization crumbles, when the institutional framework of religion begins to break up, the search for a ...direct experience which people can feel to be religious facilitates the rise of cults. A cult differs from a formal religion in many significant ways. It is in the nature of a cult to claim some esoteric knowledge which has been submerged (or repressed by orthodoxy) for a long time but has now suddenly been illuminated. There is often some heterodox figure, mocked or scorned by the orthodox, who presents these new teachings. There are communal rites which often permit or spur an individual to act out impulses that had hitherto been repressed. In the cult, one feels as though one were exploring novel or hitherto taboo modes of conduct. What defines a cult, therefore, is its implicit emphasis on magic rather than theology, on the personal tie to a guru or to the group, rather than to an institution or a creed.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Staying in charge as a mother means exercising one's own judgment about what is best for one's child. It means, at times, disregar...ding the advice of experts. It means fighting one's way into institutional decision making in an effort to make it responsive to the needs of one's own child. It means trusting one's own point of view. Most of all, it means developing the ability to tolerate both the internal anxiety and the external hostility that are generated when one tries to stay in charge.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what's good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an i...ndividual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Autonomy means women defining themselves and the values by which they will live, and beginning to think of institutional arrangeme...nts which will order their environment in line with their needs.... Autonomy means moving out from a world in which one is born to marginality, to a past without meaning, and a future determined by others--into a world in which one acts and chooses, aware of a meaningful past and free to shape one's future.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I do not mean to imply that the good old days were perfect. But the institutions and structure--the web--of society needed reform,... not demolition. To have cut the institutional and community strands without replacing them with new ones proved to be a form of abuse to one generation and to the next. For so many Americans, the tragedy was not in dreaming that life could be better; the tragedy was that the dreaming ended.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Each day a few more lies eat into the seed with which we are born, little institutional lies from the print of newspapers, the sho...ck waves of television, and the sentimental cheats of the movie screen.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Cranks, in defending their mental constructs (and here, curiously, may be their closest approach to psycho-pathology and to seriou...s scholarship), can be formidable logicians, if not exactly sound reasoners. Most cranks, in fact, see themselves as free-lance scientists, scholars, or investigators of mechanical problems, assassination conspiracies, the origins of poetry, the destiny of the universe, the meaning of life, the nature of crankery, the fate of man, or the will of God. They share with more orthodox scholars both a professional curiosity and a possessive attitude toward whatever domain of knowledge they have chosen to make their province. They differ from them most critically in the soundness of their critical faculties. But is this difference really as great, as intrinsic to their personalities, as it first appears? Perhaps professional academics have no greater sense of limit, of proportion, and of really critical intelligence; it may be only the overwhelming weight of that institutional discipline that keeps the minds of scientists and scholars safely within the straight (and narrow) paths of academic orthodoxy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Democracy is a political method, that is to say, a certain type of institutional arrangement for arriving at political--legislativ...e and administrative--decisions and hence incapable of being an end in itself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »