If you are good for nothing else, you can still serve as a bad example.

Institutions provide procedures through which human conduct is patterned, compelled to go, in grooves deemed desirable by society. And this trick is performed by making these grooves appear to the individual as the only possible ones.

I'm sure Putnam is right that there's been a decline in certain kinds of organizations like bowling leagues. But people participate in communities in other ways.

In all advanced industrial societies, education has become the single most important vehicle of upward mobility.

One can't understand the Christian Right and similar movements unless one sees them as reactive - they're reacting to what they call secular humanism

On the one hand, man is a body, in the same way that this may be said of every other animal organism. On the other hand, man has a body. That is, man experiences himself as an entity that is not identical with his body, but that, on the contrary, has that body at its disposal. In other words, man's experience of himself always hovers in a balance between being and having a body, a balance that must be redressed again and again.

If the cultural elite has its way, the U.S. will be much more like Europe