Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.

The very shaping of history now outpaces the ability of men to orient themselves in accordance with cherished values.

The life-fate of the modern individual depends not only upon the family into which he was born or which he enters by marriage, but increasingly upon the corporation in which he spends the most alert hours of his best years.

To accept opinions is to gain the good solid feeling of being correct without having to think.

For the corporation executives, the military metaphysic often coincides with their interest in a stable and planned flow of profit; it enables them to have their risk underwritten by public money; it enables them reasonably to expect that they can exploit for private profit now and later, the risky research developments paid for by public money. It is, in brief, a mask of the subsidized capitalism from which they extract profit and upon which their power is based.

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

The professional celebrity, male and female, is the crowning result of the star system of a society that makes a fetish of competition. In America, this system is carried to the point where a man who can knock a small white ball into a series of holes in the ground with more efficiency than anyone else thereby gains social access to the President of the United States.