Daniel Bell

Quotes

1. 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.

   p. 226

2. 

   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.

   p. 274

3. 

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

   p. 196

4. 

   When a person is confirmed by others, there has to be some sign of recognition.

   p. 90

5. 

   Where religions fail, cults appear.

   p. 168

6. 

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

   p. 95

7. 

   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.

   p. 244

8. 

   The relationship between a civilization's socio-economic structure and its culture is perhaps the most complicated of all problems for the sociologist.

   p. 33

9. 

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

10. 

    It is equally clear that what an individual often wants for himself (such as an open highway) in the aggregate becomes a nightmare.

    p. 21

11. 

    Television, as the most "public" of media, has its limits.

    p. 108

12. 

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

    p. 124