It is only a short step from exaggerating what we can find in the world to exaggerating our power to remake the world.

The problem for us is less to discover the way it really is than to see the meaning of the way.

. . . the messiness of experience, that may be what we mean by life.

The force of the advertising word and image dwarfs the power of other literature in the 20th century.

Where ruts have not yet been worn, it requires less effort to stay out of them.

Disagreement produces debate but dissent produces dissension. Dissent (which come from the Latin, dis and sentire) means originally to feel apart from others. People who disagree have an argument, but people who dissent have a quarrel. People may disagree and both may count themselves in the majority. But a person who dissents is by definition in a minority. A liberal society thrives on disagreement but is killed by dissension. Disagreement is the life blood of democracy, dissension is its cancer.

The American citizen lives in a world where fantasy is more real than reality, where the image has more dignity than its original. We hardly dare face our bewilderment, because our ambiguous experience is so pleasantly irridescent, and the solace of belief in contrived reality is so thoroughly real. We have become eager accessories to the great hoaxes of the age. These are the hoaxes we play on ourselves.