Daniel Bell Quotes

Crime is a form of "unorganized" class struggle, and the lowest groups in the society have always committed a disproportionate number of crimes.

Where religions fail, cults appear.

When a person is confirmed by others, there has to be some sign of recognition.

If the language of art is not accessible to ordinary language and ordinary experience, how can it be accessible to ordinary people?

Art is not life, but in a sense something contrary to life, since life is transient and changing, while art is permanent.

The one thing that would utterly destroy the new capitalism is the serious practice of deferred gratification.

It is equally clear that what an individual often wants for himself (such as an open highway) in the aggregate becomes a nightmare.

The relationship between a civilization's socio-economic structure and its culture is perhaps the most complicated of all problems for the sociologist.

The democratization of genius is made possible by the fact while one can quarrel with judgments, one cannot quarrel with feelings.

Modern culture is defined by this extraordinary freedom to ransack the world storehouse and to engorge any and every style it comes upon.

It is important to realize that the market economy, though it is associated historically with the rise of modern private capitalism, is as a mechanism not necessarily limited to that system.

That fabulous polymath Samuel Johnson maintained that no man in his right mind ever read a book through from beginning to end.

What makes the spectacle of Western bourgeois society so repulsive is the waste and squander of resources on needless products of status or display (e.g., the large, heavy automobile; the extravagant packaging of consumer items) for the sake of consumption.

Today, the culture can hardly, if at all, reflect the society in which people live.

The discussion of any society risks seduction by what is transient and tumultuous.