Why, I ask, isn't it possible that advertising as a whole is a fantastic fraud, presenting an image of America taken seriously by no one, least of all by the advertising men who create it?

Those who are excluded from meaningful work are, by an large, excluded from meaningful play.

There has been a change in heroes within the working-class community

The closest thing we have to the traditional ideology of the leisure class is a group of artists and intellectuals who regard their work as play and their play as work.

The situation of the factory worker today is reminiscent in certain respects of that of the nineteenth-century capitalist whose wife dragged him reluctantly toward "culture" and away from his "materialistic" preoccupations.

Though top executives may work as hard as ever-in part perhaps because, being trained in an earlier day, they can hardly help doing so-their subordinates are somewhat less work-minded.

America is not only big and rich, it is mysterious; and its capacity for the humorous or ironical concealment of its interests matches that of the legendary inscrutable Chinese.