Our society offers little in the way of reeducation for those who have been torn away from their traditional culture and suddenly exposed to all the blandishments of mass culture-even the churches which follow the hillbillies to the city often make use of the same "hard sell" that the advertisers and politicians do.

David Riesman

Categorized in : Education Cities Mass Culture

Men are created different; they lose their social freedom and their individual autonomy in seeking to become like each other.

David Riesman

freedom class men

Words not only affect us temporarily; they change us, they socialize or unsocialize us.

David Riesman

change

Nowadays, truth is the greatest news. The mass media are the wholesalers, the peer groups, the retailers of the communications industry.

David Riesman

gossip communication media

The ethical regime [of the Jews] was quite definitely Ptolemaic, revolving around the small group of Jews, not the larger Gentile group and, accordingly, they learned to remain unimpressed by Gentile temporal power. Being unimpressed did not mean being unafraid material power might beat or starve one to death; it did mean refusing to surrender moral hegemony to the majority merely because it had power.

David Riesman

majority might mean

The children themselves, before they get access to a car, are captives of their suburb, save for those families where the housewives surrender continuity in their own lives to chauffeur their children to lessons, doctors, and other services that could be reached via public transport in the city.

David Riesman

doctors cities children

It is not new for the older generation to bewail the indolence of the young, and there is a tendency for the latter to maintain much of the older ethic screened by a new semantics and an altered ideology.

David Riesman

indolence ethics generations

Etiquette can be at the same time a means of approaching people and of staying clear of them.

David Riesman

manners mean people

America is not only big and rich, it is mysterious; and its capacity for the humorous or ironical concealment of its interests matches that of the legendary inscrutable Chinese.

David Riesman

chinese humorous america

If you want to get out of medicine the fullest enjoyment, be students all your lives.

David Riesman

enjoy-life medicine want

Those who are excluded from meaningful work are, by an large, excluded from meaningful play.

David Riesman

meaningful-work play meaningful

It is among the less privileged groups relatively new to leisure and consumption that the zest for possessions retains something of its pristine energy.

David Riesman

zest groups energy

If anything remains more or less unchanged, it will be the role of women.

David Riesman

remains roles ifs

The media, far from being a conspiracy to dull the political sense of the people, could be viewed as a conspiracy to disguise the extent of political indifference.

David Riesman

empathy media people

Though top executives may work as hard as ever-in part perhaps because, being trained in an earlier day, they can hardly help doing so-their subordinates are somewhat less work-minded.

David Riesman

work may helping

There is evidence that young men in the big law firms, although they still work harder than most of their clients, do not glory in putting in night work and weekend hours as they once did.

David Riesman

weekend hard-work night

The situation of the factory worker today is reminiscent in certain respects of that of the nineteenth-century capitalist whose wife dragged him reluctantly toward "culture" and away from his "materialistic" preoccupations.

David Riesman

wife today culture

The premonition of death may for many be a stimulus to novelty of experience: the imminence of death serves to sweep away the inessential preoccupations for those who do not flee from the thought of death into triviality.

David Riesman

preoccupation novelty may

A decline of exuberance is just barely noticeable in America, making itself felt particularly among the most highly educated and the well-to-do in a loss of appetite for work and perhaps even for leisure.

David Riesman

enthusiasm loss america

Look at all the sentences which seem true and question them.

David Riesman

questioning sentences looks

Drivers in a traffic jam, frustrated by each others presence, are not the most amiable of men.

David Riesman

frustrated jam men