"The more specialized a vision the sharper its focus; but 
    also the more nearly total the blind spot toward all things
    that lie on the periphery of this focus."

   "Specialization is the price we pay for the advancement of
    knowledge. A price, because the path of specialization 
    leads away from the ordinary and concrete acts of 
    understanding in terms of which man actually lives his 
    day-to-day life."

   "We do not ask ourselves what the ultimate ideas behind our
    civilization are that have brought us into danger; we do
    not search for the human face behind the bewildering array
    of instruments that man has forged; in a word, we do not 
    dare to be philosophical."
 
   "The attempt to see the whole or integral man, in place of
    the rational or epistemological fragment of him, involves
    our taking a look at some unpleasant things."

   "The harking back to an earlier and better state of mankind,
    to some golden age of the past, is indeed a perpetual
    tendency of human nature. The present situation must 
    always, when we come to see it fully, appear threatening:
    it is a situation, we think, that has to be transformed
    or redeemed. Today is always and for all men the digging
    of one's way out of the ruins of yesterday."

   "Love is menaced always by a perpetual oscillation between
    sadism and masochism: In sadism I reduce the other to a 
    mere lump, to be beaten and manipulated as I choose, while
    in masochism I offer myself as an object, but in an 
    attempt to entrap the other and undermine his freedom."

   "Modern art touches a sore spot, or several sore spots, in
    the ordinary citizen of which he is totally unaware. The 
    more irritated he becomes at modern art the more he 
    betrays the fact that he himself, and his civilization, 
    are implicated in what the artist shows him."

    - William Barrett, Irrational Man (1958)