Daniel Bell Quotes
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But in action, one defies one's character.
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The impulse of the journalist is to be novel, yet to relate his curiosities to the urgencies of the moment; the philosopher seeks what he conceives to be true, regardless of the moment.
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When theology erodes and organization crumbles, when the institutional framework of religion begins to break up, the search for a direct experience which people can feel to be religious facilitates the rise of cults.
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I am too weary to listen, too angry to hear.
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The democratization of genius is made possible by the fact while one can quarrel with judgments, one cannot quarrel with feelings.
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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.
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Technology, like art, is a soaring exercise of the human imagination.
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That fabulous polymath Samuel Johnson maintained that no man in his right mind ever read a book through from beginning to end.
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The intellectual takes as a starting point his self and relates the world to his own sensibilities; the scientist accepts an existing field of knowledge and seeks to map out the unexplored terrain.
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The one thing that would utterly destroy the new capitalism is the serious practice of deferred gratification.
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No one can buy his share of 'clean air' in the market; one has to use communal mechanisms in order to deal with pollution.
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Religions grow out of the deepest needs of individuals sharing a common awakening, and are not created by 'engineers of the soul.'
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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.
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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.
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Nihilism, then, is the end process of rationalism. It is man's self conscious will to destroy his past and control his future. It is modernity at its extreme.
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The virtue of the market is that it disperses responsibility.
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The relationship between a civilization's socio-economic structure and its culture is perhaps the most complicated of all problems for the sociologist.
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It is equally clear that what an individual often wants for himself (such as an open highway) in the aggregate becomes a nightmare.
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Europe, in legend, has always been the home of subtle philosophical discussion; America was the land of grubby pragmatism.
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Today, the culture can hardly, if at all, reflect the society in which people live.
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Art is not life, but in a sense something contrary to life, since life is transient and changing, while art is permanent.
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Every society seeks to establish a set of meanings through which people can relate themselves to the world.
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When a person is confirmed by others, there has to be some sign of recognition.
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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.