In our time, what is at issue is the very nature of man, the image we have of his limits and possibilities as a man. History is not yet done with its exploration of the limits and meanings of human nature.

Prestige is the shadow of money and power.

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 say that you can 'have experience,' means, for one thing, that your past plays into and affects your present, and that it defines your capacity for future experience. As a social scientist, you have to control this rather elaborate interplay, to capture what you experience and sort it out; only in this way can you hope to use it to guide and test your reflection, and in the process shape yourself as an intellectual craftsman

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

Much work is merely a way to make money; much leisure is merely a way to spend it.

All politics is a struggle for power; the ultimate kind of power is violence.