Top 15 Daniel Bell Quotes

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.

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.

No one "voted in" the market economy and the industrial revolution, but today issues of direction of the economy, costs, redress, priorities, and goals all have become matters of conscious and debated social policy.

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.

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

The virtue of the market is that it disperses responsibility.

No one can buy his share of "clean air" in the market; one has to use communal mechanisms in order to deal with pollution.

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

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.

Every society seeks to establish a set of meanings through which people can relate themselves to the world.

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

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.

Television, as the most "public" of media, has its limits.