Christopher Good

“While the culture of manager and therapist does not speak in the language of traditional moralities, it nonetheless proffers a normative order of life, with character ideals, images of the good life, and methods of attaining it. Yet it is an understanding of life generally hostile to older ideas of moral order. Its center is the autonomous individual, presumed able to choose the roles he wil play and the commitments he will make, not on the basis of higher truths but according to the criterion of life-effectiveness as the individual judges it.”
― Robert N. Bellah, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life

“[The] passive assertion of superstitious men waiting for Destiny to fell them . . . is an attitude that most sensible men and women can easily reject. But rejection means assuming responsibility. And in our elites there is no desire to initiate changes which would insert the concept of responsibility into that of power. Only a persistent public commitment by the citizenry could bring such a thing about.”
― John Ralston Saul, The Unconscious Civilization

“I feel such stillness, the stillness of listening to a story whose end I know. I am looking at times when people had a story to enact and the streets they walked upon were narrative passages. What kind of word is infrastructure? It is a word that proves we have lost our city. Our streets are for transit. Our stories are disassembled, the skyscrapers crowding us scoff at the idea of a credible culture.”
― E.L. Doctorow, City of God