'“Human maturity has its source in the youth it brings to fruition. The deeper the source, the more extravagant the growth, which is another way of saying that human youth, in its neotenic relay, makes possible a capacity for spiritual maturation that has no equivalent in the animal kingdom, insofar as it opens humankind up to a wide range of psychic, and not merely organic, modes of being. When it comes to our species-being, this is the deeper meaning of the otherwise trite phrase “The child is the father of the man.”'

'“What remains to be done is to examine in detail, with reference to specific examples, the way wisdom and genius have worked together in the past to bring veritable “neotenic revolutions.”'

“A nation can build for the future, invest in the future, and undertake industrial, social, or technological projects for the future, yet if it does not find ways to metabolize its past, it remains without genuine prospects. That means that its youth remains largely stagnant, culturally speaking. The greatness of Western civilization, for all its disfiguring vices, consists in the fact that it has repeatedly found ways to regenerate itself by returning to, or fetching from, its nascent sources. The creative synergy between Western wisdom and Western genius has always taken the form of projective retrieval—of birthing the new from the womb of antecedence. Thus retrieval, in this radical sense, has little to do with revival and everything to do with revitalization.”