“Americans invented adolescence. It is not a natural phenomenon. Adolescence is a social construct, created by an urban-industrial society that keeps its young at home far past puberty. Teenage angst is a luxury if a successful modern human conceit that isn't condoned by our superior species.”

“To die; to decide to die; that's much easier for an adolescent than for an adult. What? Doesn't death strip an adolescent of a far larger portion of future? Certainly it does, but for a young person, the future is a remote, abstract, unreal thing he doesn't really believe in.”

“If facts, logic, and scientific procedures are all just arbitrarily "socially constructed" notions, then all that is left is consensus--more specifically peer consensus, the kind of consensus that matters to adolescents or to many among the intelligentsia.”

“It is a characteristic conceit of our species to put human face on random cosmic violence.”

“Our social tools are not an improvement to modern society, they are a challenge to it.”

“the American nation today is infantile so much as adolescent—that is ambivalent in its twin desire for both authoritarian structure and the end of parental hegemony”