Daniel Bell

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

— Daniel Bell

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

— Daniel Bell

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.

— Daniel Bell

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

— Daniel Bell

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

— Daniel Bell

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

— Daniel Bell

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

— Daniel Bell

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

— Daniel Bell

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

— Daniel Bell

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

— Daniel Bell

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

— Daniel Bell

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

— Daniel Bell

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

— Daniel Bell

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

— Daniel Bell

Where religions fail, cults appear.

— Daniel Bell

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

— Daniel Bell

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

— Daniel Bell

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

— Daniel Bell

The virtue of the market is that it disperses responsibility.

— Daniel Bell

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

— Daniel Bell

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.

— Daniel Bell

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.

— Daniel Bell

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.

— Daniel 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.

— Daniel Bell

Technology, like art, is a soaring exercise of the human imagination.

— Daniel Bell

The intellectual takes as a starting point his self and relates the world to his own sensibilities; the scientist accepts an existing field of knowledge and seeks to map out the unexplored terrain.

— Daniel Bell

Technology, like art, is a soaring exercise of the human imagination.

— Daniel Bell

I am too weary to listen, too angry to hear.

— Daniel Bell