Edgar Friedenberg Quotes

18 quotes in 265 categories

• Juvenile delinquency serves many purposes, including that of providing sadistic adults with fantasies suited to their special tastes.
• What we must decide is how we are valuable rather than how valuable we are.
• The examined life has always been pretty well confined to a privileged class.
• Human life is a continuous thread which each of us spins to his own pattern, rich and complex in meaning. There are no natural knots…
• The teenager seems to have replaced the Communist as the appropriate target for public controversy and foreboding.
• Not only do most people accept violence if it is perpetuated by legitimate authority, they also regard violence against certain kinds of people as inherently…
• It takes a kind of shabby arrogance to survive in our time, and a fairly romantic nature to want to.
• In a world as empirical as ours, a youngster who does not know what he is good at will not be sure what he is…
• Only science can hope to keep technology in some sort of moral order.
• What is learned in high school, or for that matter anywhere at all, depends far less on what is taught than on what one actually…
• Those who love the young best stay young longer.
• The atmosphere [in the school lunchroom] is not quite that of a prison, because the students are permitted to talk quietly, under the frowning scrutiny…
• No American is prepared to attend his own funeral without the services of highly skilled cosmeticians. Part of the American dream, after all, is to…
• Every major industrial society believes it has a serious youth problem.
• Romance, like alcohol, should be enjoyed but must not be allowed to become necessary.
• Most Americans would say that they disapproved of violence. But what they really mean is that they believe it should be the monopoly of the…
• If a people have no word for something, either it does not matter to them or it matters too much to talk about.
• Adolescents tend to be passionate people, and passion is no less real because it is directed toward a hot-rod, a commercialized popular singer, or the…

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