Up to a certain point anxiety is good, for it promotes action. Beyond that point we freeze any fixed attitudes or rush about without thinking deeply from one decision to another.

School is indeed a training for later life not because it teaches the 3 Rs (more or less), but because it instills the essential cultural nightmare fear of failure, envy of success, and absurdity.

I was less successful in my attempts to effect preventive vaccination against typhus by using the virus and in trying to produce large quantities of serum using large animals

A competitive culture endures by tearing people down.

If advertising has invaded the judgment of children, it has also forced its way into the family, an insolent usurper of parental function, degrading parents to mere intermediaries between their children and the market. This indeed is a social revoluation in our time!

Human beings have the capacity to learn to want almost any conceivable material object. Given, then, the emergence of a modern industrial culture capable of producing almost anything, the time is ripe for opening the storehouse of infinite need!... It is the modern Pandora's box, and its plagues are loose upon the world.

The function of high school, then, is not so much to communicate knowledge as to oblige children finally to accept the grading system as a measure of their inner excellence. And a function of the self-destructive process in American children is to make them willing to accept not their own, but a variety of other standards, like a grading system, for measuring themselves. It is thus apparent that the way American culture is now integrated it would fall apart if it did not engender feelings of inferiority and worthlessness.