David Riesman Quotes

If we observe the aging of individuals, in the period after middle life, it seems to me that we can distinguish three ideal-typical outcomes. Some individuals bear within themselves some psychological sources of self-renewal; aging brings for them accretions of wisdom, with no loss of spontaneity and ability to enjoy life, and they are relatively independent of the culture’s strictures and penalties imposed on the aged. Other individuals, possibly the majority, bear within them no such resources but are the beneficiaries of a cultural preservative (derived from work, power, position, etc.) which sustains them although only so long as the cultural conditions remain stable and protective. A third group, protected neither from within nor from without, simply decay. In terms more fully delineated elsewhere, we may have autonomous, adjusted, and anomic reactions to aging.

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

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

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.

The Autonomous. In the case of someone like Bertrand Russell or Toscanini, one feels an essential aliveness of spirit that reflexively keeps the body alive too, in the face of the inevitable physiological catabolisms. … Such men are not necessarily “balanced” or “well-adjusted” people: they may … get along well with very few people, or prefer the “company” of dead people. … One can see in such cases a passionate interest or preoccupation which has remained alive since childhood—though perhaps newly justified or rediscovered in middle life. … Such individuals are fairly immune to cultural changes, or to cultural definitions of their own physical changes: they carry their preservative, their “spirits,” within. … As long as the body does not actively prevent, these men are immortal because of their ability to renew themselves.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.