The full life depends, not on the range of experience but on the intensity of the interest, the emotion involved, and on its being a personal interest.

In any relationship we feel an unconscious need to create, as it were, a new picture, a new edition of ourselves to present to the fresh person who claims our interests; for them, we in a strange sense wish to, and do, start life anew.

advertising confuses values ... By appealing either to fear, or to vanity, or to covetousness, it very skillfully insinuates false values.

What I find most injurious to mankind in modern advertising is the constant appeal to material standards and values, the elevating of material things into an end in themselves, a virtue.

America ... holds up its way of life as the ideal for every nation, and seeks to impose its own standards of living - which many people think ridiculously and unwholesomely high - on others, partly of course in the search for markets. If it were openly stated that it was just a search for markets, that would be one thing, but it is not; by a tremendous propaganda campaign this materialistic conception is held up as an ideal, as somehow part of liberty, and above all, as a form of happiness.

The full life depends, not on the range of experience but on the intensity of the interest, the emotion involved, and on its being a personal interest.

there is that wish, in the name of democracy, to level down, because high cultural standards are despised and rejected, and even feared, in our Western Democracies. Don't let anyone else have what I've not got, or can't enjoy! - is the secret theory. A very large number of writers in the British and American popular press profess to be preaching democracy when in fact they are only trying to make envy respectable!