Daniel Bell

"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."

"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."

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

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

"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."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Where religions fail, cults appear."

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

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

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"“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."