David Riesman Quotes

The idea that men are created free and equal is both true and misleading: men are created different; they lose their social freedom and their individual autonomy in seeking to become like each other.

Parents today are the stage managers for the meetings of three- and four-year-olds, just as, in earlier eras, the adults managed marriages.

We all know the type of American executive or professional man who does not allow himself to age, but by what appears to be almost sheer will keeps himself “well-preserved,” as if in creosote. … The will which burns within him, while often admirable, cannot be said to be truly “his”: it is compulsive; he has no control over it, but it controls him. He appears to exist in a psychological deep-freeze; new experience cannot get at him, but rather he fulfills himself by carrying out ever-renewed tasks which are given by his environment: he is borne along on the tide of cultural agendas. So long as these agendas remain, he is safe; he does not acquire wisdom, as the old of some cultures are said to do, but he does not lose skill—or if he does, is protected by his power from the consequences, perhaps the awareness, of loss of skill. In such a man, responsibility may substitute for maturity. Indeed, it could be argued that the protection furnished such people in the united States is particularly strong since their “youthfulness” remains a social and economic prestige-point and wisdom might actually, if it brought awareness of death and which the culture regarded as pessimism, be a count against them. … They prefigure … the cultural cosmetic that makes Americans appears youthful to other peoples. And, since they are well-fed, well-groomed, and vitamin-dosed, there may be an actual delay-in-transit of the usual physiological declines to partly compensate for lack of psychological growth. Their outward appearance of aliveness may mask inner sterility.

Words not only affect us temporarily; they change us, they socialize or unsocialize us.

Why, I ask, why isn't it possible that advertising as a whole is a fantastic fraud, presenting an image of America taken seriously by no one, least of all by the advertising men who create it?

Social Science … led us to the fallacy that, since all men have their being in culture and as a result of culture, they owe a debt to that culture which even a lifetime of altruism could not repay.

Etiquette can be at the same time a means of approaching people and of staying clear of them.

The ethical regime [of the Jews] was quite definitely Ptolemaic, revolving around the small group of Jews, not the larger Gentile group—and, accordingly, they learned to remain unimpressed by Gentile temporal power. Being unimpressed did not mean being unafraid—material power might beat or starve one to death; it did mean refusing to surrender moral hegemony to the majority merely because it had power.

Today the future occupation of all moppets is to be skilled consumers.

The premonition of death may for many be a stimulus to novelty of experience: the imminence of death serves to sweep away the inessential preoccupations for those who do not flee from the thought of death into triviality.

Those who are excluded from meaningful work are, by and large, excluded from meaningful play.

[I]t is no longer clear which way is up even if one wants to rise.

The mass media are the wholesalers; the peer-groups, the retailers of the communications industry.

The media, far from being a conspiracy to dull the political sense of the people, could be viewed as a conspiracy to disguise the extent of political indifference.

America is not only big and rich, it is mysterious; and its capacity for the humorous or ironical concealment of its interests matches that of the legendary inscrutable Chinese.