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

It is among the less privileged groups relatively new to leisure and consumption that the zest for possessions retains something of its pristine energy.

Drivers in a traffic jam, frustrated by each others presence, are not the most amiable of men.

Today the future occupation of all moppets is to be skilled consumers.

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.

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

We have become a conservative country, despite our worldwide reputation for seeking novelty, in that we are unable to envisage alternative futures for ourselves.

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.

Our society offers little in the way of reeducation for those who have been torn away from their traditional culture and suddenly exposed to all the blandishments of mass culture-even the churches which follow the hillbillies to the city often make use of the same "hard sell" that the advertisers and politicians do.

Mass entertainment in America has been dominated for a long time by the mode of documentary realism.