It is a tribute to the peculiar horror of contemporary life that it makes the worst features of earlier times--the stupefaction of... the masses, the obsessed and driven lives of the bourgeoisie--seem attractive by comparison.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We do not need to minimize the poverty of the ghetto or the suffering inflicted by whites on blacks in order to see that the incre...asingly dangerous and unpredictable conditions of middle- class life have given rise to similar strategies for survival. Indeed the attraction of black culture for disaffected whites suggests that black culture now speaks to a general condition.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The master propagandist, like the advertising expert, avoids obvious emotional appeals and strives for a tone that is consistent w...ith the prosaic quality of modern life--a dry, bland matter-of-factness. Nor does the propagandist circulate "intentionally biased" information. He knows that partial truths serve as more effective instruments of deception than lies. Then he tries to impress the public with statistics of economic growth that ne glect to give the base year from which the growth is calculated, with accurate but meaningless facts about the standard of living--with raw and uninterpreted data, in other words, from which the audience is invited to draw the inescapable conclusion that things are getting better and the present regime therefore deserves the people's confidence.... By using accurate details to imply a misleading picture of the whole, the artful propagandist, it has been said, makes truth the principal form of falsehood.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A society that has made "nostalgia" a marketable commodity on the cultural exchange quickly repudiates the suggestion that life in... the past was in any important way better than life today.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Knowledge is what we get when an observer, preferably a scientifically trained observer, provides us with a copy of reality that w...e can all recognize.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Today Americans are overcome not by the sense of endless possibility but by the banality of the social order they have erected aga...inst it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »