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?

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

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.

In preindustrial cultures leisure is scarcely a burden or a “problem” because it is built into the ritual and ground plan of life for which people are conditioned in childhood; often they possess a relatively timeless attitude toward events.

One of the things people are fleeing when they leave the city is the need either to reject people who are less well educated than themselves, or to accept them with all that implies for their children’s education and future placement in the society.

The mass media are the wholesalers; the peer-groups, the retailers of the communications industry

Men are created different; they lose their social freedom and their individual autonomy in seeking to become like each other.

Words not only affect us temporarily; they change us, they socialize or unsocialize us.

Nowadays, truth is the greatest news. The mass media are the wholesalers, the peer groups, the retailers of the communications industry.

The ethical regime [of the Jews] was quite definitely Ptolemaic, revolving around the small group of Jews, not the larger Gentile group and, accordingly, they learned to remain unimpressed by Gentile temporal power. Being unimpressed did not mean being unafraid material power might beat or starve one to death; it did mean refusing to surrender moral hegemony to the majority merely because it had power.