Educators From The United States

"I help people as a way to work on myself, and I work on myself to help people… To me, that’s what the emerging game is all about."

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

"“One of his greatest and most personal essays,” as his son, David Avrom Bell, regards it, “First Love and Early Sorrows,” appears in a 1981 issue of . It is an account of his “first love”—Marxism—joining the Yipsels, the Young People’s Socialist League, in 1932 at the age of 13, and of his “early sorrows” after learning The Truth About the Boylsheviki (sic), of The Russian Tragedy and The Kronstadt Rebellion. “My early sorrows,” wrote Bell, “fortuitous as these were, had come with the awareness of ‘Kronstadt.’ That knowledge, combined with my temperament, made me a lifelong Menshevik—the chooser, almost always, of the lesser evil.” It also led to three maxims that came to rule his intellectual life: the ethic of responsibility, the politics of civility, and the fear of the zealot and the fanatic."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"The virtue of the market is that it disperses responsibility."

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

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

"Where religions fail, cults appear."

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

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

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

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

"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."

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

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

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

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

"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."

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

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

"I’ve called myself a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture. I’m a socialist in economics because I believe that every society has an obligation to give people that degree of decency to allow them to feel that they are citizens in this society... I’m a conservative in culture because I believe in continuity, and I believe in judgment. I don’t believe that all opinions in culture are the same as everybody else’s opinion. I don’t believe that all art is the same. Some things are better than others, and you have to justify why it’s better than others, and you have to understand the grounds of justification. I’m a liberal in politics but liberalism has no fixed dogmas. It has no fixed points, that you can say, “This is the liberal position.” It changes because it’s an attitude. It’s a skepticism. It’s a pluralism, it’s agnostic."

"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."

"The process of writing is a process of learning; and much has become clearer to me in the attempt to transform my original rough notes into what I hope is an intelligible presentation."

"To contribute to the emergence of a society in which development will supplant stagnation, in which growth will take the place of decay, and in which culture will put an end to barbarism is the noblest, and, indeed, the only true function of intellectual endeavor."

"In fact, all the additional knowledge gained by an irrationally constituted society may but enlarge and enhance the powers of death and destruction."

"As Hegel well knew, the ascent of reason has never followed a straight line."

"It is in underdeveloped world that he central, overriding fact of our epoch becomes manifest to the naked eye: the capitalist system, once a mighty engine of economic development, has turned into a no less formidable hurdle to human advancement."

"The present Indian government, however, is neither able or willing to accept the challenge and to provide the leadership in breaking the resistance of urban and rural interests."

"The principal impact of foreign enterprise on the development of the underdeveloped countries lies in hardening and strengthening the sway of merchant capitalism, in slowing down and indeed preventing its transformation into industrial capitalism."

"For it is no railways, roads, and power stations that give rise to industrial capitalism: it is the emergence of industrial capitalism that leads to the building of railways, to the construction of roads, and to the establishment of power stations."

"The desire to tell the truth is only one condition for being an intellectual. The other is courage, readiness to carry on rational inquiry to wherever it may lead … to withstand … comfortable and lucrative conformity."

"Whatever market for manufactured goods emerged in colonial and dependent countries did not become the "eternal market" of these countries. Thrown wide open by colonization and by unequal treaties, it became an appendage of the "internal market" of Western capitalism."

"They lived in abysmal misery, yet they had no prospect of a better tomorrow. They existed under capitalism, yet there was no accumulation of capital."

"That the means of imperialist policy overshadow almost entirely its original ends has tremendous implications."

"In a capitalist country foreign trade, like any other trade, is carried on by individual firms, and individual firms cannot be guided in their activities by "global"considerations, by concern with the impact of their operations on the economy as a whole."

"Indeed, the "whole bourgeoisie" on whose behalf the government was acting as its "committee" was a composite of a vast multitude of businessmen appearing as a conglomeration of many different and divergent groups and interests."

"It has been estimated that even in the absence of net investment, the mere substitution of modern machinery for worn-out equipment in the United States would cause an annual productivity increase of approximately 1.5 percent."

"many seemingly independent businessmen or craftsman are more or less well paid retainers of larger corporations, such as the cobbler, operating a United States shoe machine or an automobile dealer holding a license of the General Motors Corporation."

"Schumpter's daring and dashing entrepreneur is now a legendary figure from the distant past - if not from the mythology of capitalism - or is to be found only in the demimonde of business, founding new ice cream parlors or "deep freeze subscription clubs"."

"Indeed, I find it illuminating to consider to what extent our "classical conditions" for economic growth are satisfied in the current, monopolistic phase of capitalism."

"By elevating the dictum of the market to the role of the sole criterion of rationality and efficiency, economics denies even all "respectability" to the distinction between essential and non-essential consumption, between productive and unproductive labor, between actual and potential surplus."

"If society has a technical need, that helps science forward more than ten universities."

"Much if not all we know about the complex mechanism responsible for the development (and stagnation) of productive forces, and for the rise and decay of social organizations, is the result of the analytical work undertaken by Marx and by those whom he inspired."

"But when reason and the study of history began revealing the irrationality, the limitations, and the merely transitory nature of the capitalist order, bourgeois ideology as a whole and with it bourgeois economics began abandoning both reason and history."