Daniel Bell Quotes
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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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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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I am too weary to listen, too angry to hear.
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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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But in action, one defies one's character.
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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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Technology, like art, is a soaring exercise of the human imagination.
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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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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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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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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 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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Europe, in legend, has always been the home of subtle philosophical discussion; America was the land of grubby pragmatism.
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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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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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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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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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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 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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The one thing that would utterly destroy the new capitalism is the serious practice of deferred gratification.
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The demand for group rights will widen in the society, because social life increasingly becomes organized on a group basis.
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Television, as the most 'public' of media, has its limits.
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If the language of art is not accessible to ordinary language and ordinary experience, how can it be accessible to ordinary people?