Robert A. Nisbet Quotes

#1. The greatest intellectual and moral offense the modern intellectual can be found guilty of is that of seeming to think or act outside what is commonly held to be the linear progress of civilization.

Robert A. Nisbet

#2. Genuine freedom is not based upon the negative psychology of release. Its roots are in positive acts of dedication to ends and values. Freedom presupposes the autonomous existence of values which men wish to be free to follow and measure up to.

Robert A. Nisbet

#3. Not the free individual but the lost individual; not Independence but isolation; not self-discovery but self-obsession; not the conquer but to be conquered; these are major states of mind in contemporary imaginative literature.

Robert A. Nisbet

#4. Culture does not exist autonomously; it is set always in the context of social relationships.

Robert A. Nisbet

#5. A sense of the past is far more basic to the maintenance of freedom than hope for the future. The former is concrete and real; the latter is necessarily amorphous and more easily guided by those who can manipulate human actions and beliefs.

Robert A. Nisbet