"People who do not know what government is are not likely to know what democracy is either, for democracy is only what the soft inside of the oyster looks like."

"Every fight consists of two parts: (1) the few individuals who are actively engaged at the center and (2) the audience that is irresistibly attracted to the scene. The spectators are as much a part of the over-all situation as are the overt combatants. The spectators are an integral part of the situation, for, as likely as not, the audience determines the outcome of the fight. The crowd is loaded with portentousness because it is apt to be a hundred times as large as the fighting minority, and the relations of the audience and the combatants are highly unstable. Like all other chain reactions, a fight is difficult to contain. To understand any conflict it is necessary, therefore, to keep constantly in mind the relations between the combatants and the audience because the audience is likely to do the kinds of things that determine the outcome of the fight. This is true because the audience is overwhelming; it is never really neutral; the excitement of the conflict communicates itself to the crowd. This is the basic pattern of all politics."

"“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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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?"

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

"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."

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

"Where religions fail, cults appear."

"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."

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

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

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

"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."

"If, after proper study, a verse does not clearly convey the circumstances and/or the emotion involved, it is not a haiku."

"Haiku...meditations...starting points for trains of thought"

"If, in reading translations, you come across a haiku that does not convey to you any emotion at all, do not blame yourself or the poet. Blame it on the translator!"

"As every bookie knows instinctively, a number such as reliability - a qualitative rather than a quantitative measure - is needed to make the valuation of information practically useful."

"Paradox is the sharpest scalpel in the satchel of science. Nothing concentrates the mind as effectively, regardless of whether it pits two competing theories against each other, or theory against observation, or a compelling mathematical deduction against ordinary common sense."

"If quantum communication and quantum computation are to flourish, a new information theory will have to be developed."

"Nowhere is the difference between either/or and both/and more clearly apparent than in the context of information."

"An electron is real; a probability is not."

"As with all quantum devices, a qubit is a delicate flower. If you so much as look at it, you destroy it."

"To put it one way, a collection of Shakespeare's plays is richer than a phone book that uses the same number of letters; to put it another, the essence of information lies in the relationships among bits, not their sheer number."

"Both induction and deduction, reasoning from the particular and the general, and back again from the universal to the specific, form the essence to scientific thinking."

"The switch from 'steam engines' to 'heat engines' signals the transition from engineering practice to theoretical science."

"This is not what I thought physics was about when I started out: I learned that the idea is to explain nature in terms of clearly understood mathematical laws; but perhaps comparisons are the best we can hope for."

"The smell of subjectivity clings to the mechanical definition of complexity as stubbornly as it sticks to the definition of information."

"Entropy is not about speeds or positions of particles, the way temperature and pressure and volume are, but about our lack of information."

"In fact, an information theory that leaves out the issue of noise turns out to have no content."

"The solution of the Monty Hall problem hinges on the concept of information, and more specifically, on the relationship between added information and probability."

"Underneath the shifting appearances of the world as perceived by our unreliable senses, is there, or is there not, a bedrock of objective reality?"

"If the intensity of the material world is plotted along the horizontal axis, and the response of the human mind is on the vertical, the relation between the two is represented by the logarithmic curve. Could this rule provide a clue to the relationship between the objective measure of information, and our subjective perception of it?"

"Time has been called God's way of making sure that everything doesn't happen at once. In the same spirit, noise is Nature's way of making sure that we don't find out everything that happens. Noise, in short, is the protector of information."

"Science has taught us that what we see and touch is not what is really there."