Daniel Bell

Quotes

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

   p. 146

2. 

   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.

   p. 4

3. 

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

   p. 78

4. 

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

5. 

   Crime is a form of "unorganized" class struggle, and the lowest groups in the society have always committed a disproportionate number of crimes.

   p. 189

6. 

   The democratization of genius is made possible by the fact while one can quarrel with judgments, one cannot quarrel with feelings.

   p. 134

7. 

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

   p. 13

8. 

   The demand for group rights will widen in the society, because social life increasingly becomes organized on a group basis.

   p. 198

9. 

   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.

   p. 223

10. 

    The virtue of the market is that it disperses responsibility.

    p. 197

11. 

    If the language of art is not accessible to ordinary language and ordinary experience, how can it be accessible to ordinary people?

    p. 131

12. 

    The discussion of any society risks seduction by what is transient and tumultuous.

    p. 191