Daniel A. Bell

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.

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

Where religions fail, cults appear.

Today, the culture can hardly, if at all, reflect the society in which people live.

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.

Religions grow out of the deepest needs of individuals sharing a common awakening, and are not created by "engineers of the soul."

Art is not life, but in a sense something contrary to life, since life is transient and changing, while art is permanent.

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

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.

The one thing that would utterly destroy the new capitalism is the serious practice of deferred gratification.

That fabulous polymath Samuel Johnson maintained that no man in his right mind ever read a book through from beginning to end.

Modern culture is defined by this extraordinary freedom to ransack the world storehouse and to engorge any and every style it comes upon.