DANIEL BELL

The nation-state has become too small for the big problems of life and too big for the small problems.

Fundamentally, where you have an industry in which labor is the primary cost, we can’t compete and probably shouldn’t.

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

One simply turns to the ideological vending machine, and out comes the prepared formulae.

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

The workers, whose grievances were once the driving energy for social change, are more satisfied with society than the intellectuals. The workers have not achieved Utopia but their expectations were less than those of the intellectuals, and the gains correspondingly larger.

The impulse of the journalist is to be novel, yet to relate his curiosities to the urgencies of the moment; the philosopher seeks what he conceives to be true, regardless of the moment.

Europe, in legend, has always been the home of subtle philosophical discussion; America was the land of grubby pragmatism.

When theology erodes and organization crumbles, when the institutional framework of religion begins to break up, the search for a direct experience which people can feel to be religious facilitates the rise of cults.

Art is an end in itself; its values are intrinsic.

But in action, one defies one's character.

The impulse of the journalist is to be novel, yet to relate his curiosities to the urgencies of the moment; the philosopher seeks what he conceives to be true, regardless of the moment.

Europe, in legend, has always been the home of subtle philosophical discussion; America was the land of grubby pragmatism.

When theology erodes and organization crumbles, when the institutional framework of religion begins to break up, the search for a direct experience which people can feel to be religious facilitates the rise of cults.

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

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.

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

The nation-state has become too small for the big problems of life and too big for the small problems.

Fundamentally, where you have an industry in which labor is the primary cost, we can’t compete and probably shouldn’t.

The old simplifications about "more" schools and "more" housing, or even "better" schools or "better" housing, have not proved very successful in breaking the cycle of poverty or in dealing with the Negro family structure.

Action is typical of the American style, thought and planning are not; it is considered heresy to state that some problems are not immediately or easily solvable.

The belief in American exceptionalism has vanished with the end of empire, the weakening of power, the loss of faith in America’s future.

The workers, whose grievances were once the driving energy for social change, are more satisfied with society than the intellectuals. The workers have not achieved Utopia but their expectations were less than those of the intellectuals, and the gains correspondingly larger.

The tendency to convert concrete issues into ideological problems, to invest them with moral color and high emotional charge, is to invite conflicts which can only damage a society.

Art is an end in itself; its values are intrinsic.

Art is the reordering of nature - the qualities of space and time - in new perceptual and material form.

One simply turns to the ideological vending machine, and out comes the prepared formulae.

Art is the aesthetic ordering of experience to express meanings in symbolic terms.