Daniel Bell Quotes

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

Gadgets can be engineered, programs can be designed, institutions can be built, but belief has an organic quality, and it cannot be called into being by fiat. Once a faith is shattered, it takes a long time to grow again - for its soil is experience - and to become effective again.

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

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

Where religions fail, cults appear.

The demand for group rights will widen in the society, because social life increasingly becomes organized on a group basis.