My plans have always exceeded my capacities and energies

The means of effective communication are being expropriated from the intellectual worker.

According to your belief [Christian clergy], my kind of man — secular, prideful, agnostic and all the rest of it — is among the damned. I'm on my own. You've got your God.

Commercial jazz, soap opera, pulp fiction, comic strips, the movies set the images, mannerisms, standards, and aims of the urban masses. In one way or another, everyone is equal before these cultural machines; like technology itself, the mass media are nearly universal in their incidence and appeal. They are a kind of common denominator, a kind of scheme for pre-scheduled, mass emotions.

Nobody talks more of free enterprise and competition and of the best man winning than the man who inherited his father's store or farm.

In the world of the celebrity, the hierarchy of publicity has replaced the hierarchy of descent and even of great wealth.

Not wishing to be disturbed over moral issues of the political economy, Americans cling to the notion that the government is a sort of automatic machine, regulated by the balancing of competing interests.