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."

"I was born in galut [exile] and I accept—now gladly, though once in pain—the double burden and the double pleasure of my self-consciousness, the outward life of an American and the inward secret of the Jew. I walk with this sign as a frontlet between my eyes, and it is as visible to some secret others as their sign is to me."

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

"Nihilism, then, is the end process of rationalism. It is mans self conscious will to destroy his past and control his future. It is modernity at its extreme."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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