David Riesman Quotes

31 quotes in 500 categories

• Nowadays, truth is the greatest news. The mass media are the wholesalers, the peer groups, the retailers of the communications industry.
• It is no longer clear which way is up even if one wants to rise.
• Men are created different; they lose their social freedom and their individual autonomy in seeking to become like each other.
• Words not only affect us temporarily; they change us, they socialize or unsocialize us.
• The media, far from being a conspiracy to dull the political sense of the people, could be viewed as a conspiracy to disguise the extent…
• If you want to get out of medicine the fullest enjoyment, be students all your lives.
• Those who are excluded from meaningful work are, by an large, excluded from meaningful play.
• Social Science … led us to the fallacy that, since all men have their being in culture and as a result of culture, they owe…
• Why, I ask, isn't it possible that advertising as a whole is a fantastic fraud, presenting an image of America taken seriously by no one,…
• The premonition of death may for many be a stimulus to novelty of experience: the imminence of death serves to sweep away the inessential preoccupations…
• Look at all the sentences which seem true and question them.
• Today the future occupation of all moppets is to be skilled consumers.
• If anything remains more or less unchanged, it will be the role of women.
• It is among the less privileged groups relatively new to leisure and consumption that the zest for possessions retains something of its pristine energy.
• Drivers in a traffic jam, frustrated by each others presence, are not the most amiable of men.
• One of the things people are fleeing when they leave the city is the need either to reject people who are less well educated than…
• The situation of the factory worker today is reminiscent in certain respects of that of the nineteenth-century capitalist whose wife dragged him reluctantly toward "culture"…
• Mass entertainment in America has been dominated for a long time by the mode of documentary realism.
• A decline of exuberance is just barely noticeable in America, making itself felt particularly among the most highly educated and the well-to-do in a loss…
• Our society offers little in the way of reeducation for those who have been torn away from their traditional culture and suddenly exposed to all…

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