“We may look and act modern in many ways, but we can’t escape what we are... obedient chinese daughters.”

“We are beautiful because we are sons and daughters of God, not because we look a certain way.”

“We are condemned to be modern. We can’t escape the facts of our history or of living in an age dominated by instrumental rationality, even as we look for ways out of it... But it has become our historic responsibility to acknowledge the continuing importance of myth, at a level beyond science, in realizing a more organic, holistic relation to the world. A future social ecology would transcend both anti-Enlightenment reaction and [a] reified Enlightenment counter-reaction, which remain only fragmented polarities within bourgeois modernity.”

“Sometimes, we have to change the way we see things in order to see the way they truly are. We have to look at all the angles and cracks and crevices until we know what it is we’re looking at. And we can’t stop until we see it all!”

“The past is our definition. We may strive with good reason to escape it or to escape what is bad in it but we will escape it only by adding something better to it.”

“If we wish to do justice to the historical enterprise, we must take past for what it was. And that means that we must resist the temptation to scour the past for examples or precursors of modern science. We must respect the way earlier generations approached nature, acknowledging that although it may differ from the modern way, it is nonetheless of interest because it is part of our intellectual ancestry.”