Relentless improvement of the product and upgrading of consumer tastes are the heart of mass merchandising.

The family wage has been eroded by the same developments that have promoted consumerism as a way of life.

We do not need to minimize the poverty of the ghetto or the suffering inflicted by whites on blacks in order to see that the increasingly dangerous and unpredictable conditions of middle-class life have given rise to similar strategies for survival. Indeed the attraction of black culture for disaffected whites suggests that black culture now speaks to a general condition.

George Orwell's contention was that it is a sure sign of trouble when things can no longer be called by their right names and described in plain, forthright speech.

Most people no longer live in nuclear families at all.

Because politics rests on an irreducible measure of coercion, it can never become a perfect realm of perfect love and justice.

Today Americans are overcome not by the sense of endless possibility but by the banality of the social order they have erected against it.