With a bored pride; in their own hands a shallow mindless electronic device - it is without doubt - a damning indictment of modern society.

The big thing (that really good fiction) can do is leaping over that wall of self and portraying inner experience and setting up a kind of intimate conversation between two consciousnesses . . . the trick is going to be trying to find a way to do it--and for a generation--whose relation to the long sustained, linear verbal communication is fundamentally different.

Do books, after all, change anything? For all their proverbial liberalism, have they made the world more liberal? Or have they offered the fig leaf that allows us to go on as we were, liberal in our reading and conservative in our living. Perhaps art is more part of the problem than the solution; we may be going to hell, but look how well we write about it, look at our paintings and operas and tragedies.

But it (serial television) doesn’t remain in the mind. It doesn’t produce positive effects in political terms, in ideological terms. My impression is that this extraordinary digital revolution is producing also an extraordinary confusion.

Today's person spends way more time in front of screens, in florescent lit rooms, in cubicles being on one end of the other of an electronic data transfer . . . What is it to be human and alive and exercise your humanity in that kind of exchange?

Our debates, for the most part, are examples unworthy of a playground: name-calling, verbal slaps, gossip, giggles, all while the swings and slides of governance remain empty.

Xiii- men must...find their way from false to true consciousness, from their immediate to their real interest. They can do so only if they live in need of changing their way of life, of denying the positive, of refusing, it is precisely this need which the established society manages to repress using the scientific conquest of nature for the scientific conquest of man. Xvi-the technological society is a system of domination.

At my glummest, I sometimes think women get to chose- between being punished for being unsubjugated and the continual punishment of subjugation.

Our attitudes toward human relationships are those of supermarket shoppers: we want what is cheap and quick and easy; we want variety; and we want novelty. But friendship requires a whole other set of mind.

But we Americans scrap relationships that are not working as we would like -- whether they be with relatives, with spouses, or with friends. We dispose of them like Kleenex. When it is inconvenient, painful, difficult, I get rid of you. I hit the road.