Riesman Quotes & Sayings

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? — David Riesman

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 the advertising men who create it? — David Riesman

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

It is not new for the older generation to bewail the indolence of the young, and there is a tendency for the latter to maintain much of the older ethic screened by a new semantics and an altered ideology. — David Riesman

It is no longer clear which way is up even if one wants to rise. — David Riesman

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

The closest thing we have to the traditional ideology of the leisure class is a group of artists and intellectuals who regard their work as play and their play as work. — David Riesman

Social Science ... led us to the fallacy that, since all men have their being in culture and as a result of culture, they owe a debt to that culture which even a lifetime of altruism could not repay. — David Riesman

The children themselves, before they get access to a car, are captives of their suburb, save for those families where the housewives surrender continuity in their own lives to chauffeur their children to lessons, doctors, and other services that could be reached via public transport in the city. — David Riesman

If anything remains more or less unchanged, it will be the role of women. — David Riesman

The idea that men are created free and equal is both true and misleading: men are created different; they lose their social freedom and their individual autonomy in seeking to become like each other. — David Riesman

It was only natural that the intellectuals who questioned the necessity of American purpose did not rush from Cambridge and New Haven to inflict their doubts about American power and goals upon the nation's policies. So people like Riesman, classic intellectuals, stayed where they were while the new breed of thinkers-doers, half of academe, half of the nation's think tanks and of policy planning, would make the trip, not doubting for a moment the validity of their right to serve, the quality of their experience. They were men who reflected the post-Munich, post-McCarthy pragmatism of the age. One had to stop totalitarianism, and since the only thing the totalitarians understood was force, one had to be willing to use force. They justified each decision to use power by their own conviction that the Communists were worse, which justified our dirty tricks, our toughness. — David Halberstam

Those who are excluded from meaningful work are, by an large, excluded from meaningful play. — David Riesman

If the press was, as David Riesman called it, "the gunpowder of the mind," the computer, in its capacity to smooth over unsatisfactory institutions and ideas, is the talcum powder of the mind. — Neil Postman

Etiquette can be at the same time a means of approaching people and of staying clear of them. — David Riesman

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. — David Riesman

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

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. — David Riesman

If you want to get out of medicine the fullest enjoyment, be students all your lives. — David Riesman

The modern suburb is the product of the car, the five-day week, and the "bankers' hours" of the masses. — David Riesman

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. — David Riesman

There is evidence that young men in the big law firms, although they still work harder than most of their clients, do not glory in putting in night work and weekend hours as they once did. — David Riesman

[David Riesman] had made a hobby of studying the American Civil War and he had always been disturbed by the passions which it had unleashed in the country, the tensions and angers just below the surface, the thin fabric of the society which held it all together, so easy to rend. — David Halberstam

The media, far from being a conspiracy to dull the political sense of the people, could be viewed as a conspiracy to disguise the extent of political indifference. — David Riesman

America is not only big and rich, it is mysterious; and its capacity for the humorous or ironical concealment of its interests matches that of the legendary inscrutable Chinese. — David Riesman

Though top executives may work as hard as ever-in part perhaps because, being trained in an earlier day, they can hardly help doing so-their subordinates are somewhat less work-minded. — David Riesman

A spurious democracy has influenced both our research methods (I am sometimes tempted to define "validity" as part of the context of an experiment demanding so little in the way of esoteric gift that any number can play at it, provided they have taken a certain number of courses) and our research subjects (it would be deemed snobbish to investigate only the best people). — David Riesman

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. — David Riesman

There has been a change in heroes within the working-class community — David Riesman

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