Skip to content

Quotes from The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism — Daniel Bell

1919–2011 United States

← All quotes by Daniel Bell

25 quotes

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

The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976)

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

The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976)

The virtue of the market is that it disperses responsibility.

The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976)

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

The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976)

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

The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976)

Once a faith is shattered, it takes a long time to grow again - for its soil is experience - and to become effective again.

The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976)

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

The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976)

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

The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976)

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

The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976)

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

The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976)

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

The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976)

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

The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976)

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

The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976)

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

The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976)

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

The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976)

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

The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976)

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

The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976)

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

The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976)

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

The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976)

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.

The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Daniel Bell (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.