Daniel Bell - The cultural contradictions of capitalism (1976)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 virtue of the market is that it disperses responsibility.

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

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