A society that presumes a norm of violence and celebrates aggression, whether in the subway, on the football field, or in the conduct of its business, cannot help making celebrities of the people who would destroy it.

The American oligarchy increasingly has less in common with the American people than it does with the equivalent oligarchies in Germany or Mexico or Japan.

Label celebrity a consumer society's most precious consumer product, and eventually it becomes the hero with a thousand faces, the packaging of the society's art and politics, the framework of its commerce, and the stuff of its religion.

America is about class. To pretend that it isn't is very ignorant. No society has ever existed without some kind of a ruling class.

A certain kind of rich man afflicted with the symptoms of moral dandyism sooner or later comes to the conclusion that it isn't enough merely to make money. He feels obliged to hold views, to espouse causes and elect Presidents, to explain to a trembling world how and why the world went wrong.

The figure of the enthusiast who has just discovered jogging or a new way to fix tofu can be said to stand or, more accurately, to tremble on the threshold of conversion, as the representative American

Of what does politics consist except the making of imperfect decisions, many of them unjust and quite a few of them deadly?