Get action, do things; be sane,” he once raved, “don’t fritter away your time; create, act, take a place wherever you are and be somebody: get action.

As a consequence, the heartland of America, filled with people who are often fundamentalist in religion, nativist in prejudice, isolationist in foreign policy, and conservative in economics, has constantly rumbled with an underground revolt against all these tormenting manifestations of our modern predicament.

We have learned so well how to absorb novelty that receptivity itself has turned into a kind of tradition- “the tradition of the new.” Yesterdays avant-garde experiment is today’s chic and tomorrows cliche.

There seems to be such a thing as the generically prejudiced mind. Studies.

It is a part of the intellectual’s tragedy that the things he most values about himself and his work are quite unlike those society values in him...

Once great men created fortunes; today a great system creates fortunate men.

However, in a populistic culture like ours, which seems to lack a responsible elite with political and moral autonomy, and in which it is possible to exploit the wildest currents of public sentiment for private purposes, it is at least conceivable that a highly organized, vocal, active, and well-financed minority could create a political climate in which the rational pursuit of our well-being and safety would become impossible.

The growth of the mass media of communication and their use in politics have brought politics closer to the people than ever before and have made politics a form of entertainment in which the spectators feel themselves involved. Thus it has become, more than ever before, an arena into which private emotions and personal problems can be readily projected. Mass communications have made it possible to keep the mass man in an almost constant state of political mobilisation.

To be confronted with a simple and unqualified evil is no doubt a kind of luxury...

It is possible that the distinction between moral relativism and moral absolutism has sometimes been blurred because an excessively consistent practice of either leads to the same practical result – ruthlessness in political life.