Top 34 David Riesman Quotes
#1. 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
#2. [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
#3. Now I'm starting to think he wasn't supposed to be my whole life, he was just this doorway to me.
Barbara Kingsolver
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. A school of art or of anything else is to be looked on as a single individual, who keeps talking to himself for a hundred years, and feels an extreme satisfaction with his own circle of favorite ideas, be they ever so silly.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#7. Those who are excluded from meaningful work are, by an large, excluded from meaningful play.
David Riesman
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. It is no longer clear which way is up even if one wants to rise.
David Riesman
#11. 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
#12. Etiquette can be at the same time a means of approaching people and of staying clear of them.
David Riesman
#13. Drivers in a traffic jam, frustrated by each others presence, are not the most amiable of men.
David Riesman
#14. Words not only affect us temporarily; they change us, they socialize or unsocialize us.
David Riesman
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. How strange to use 'You only live once' as an excuse to throw it away.
Bill Copeland
#18. 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
#19. If you want to get out of medicine the fullest enjoyment, be students all your lives.
David Riesman
#20. Nowadays, truth is the greatest news. The mass media are the wholesalers, the peer groups, the retailers of the communications industry.
David Riesman
#22. It was as if the rare joy that had formed in my heart was replaced by a pale shadow threatening to engulf me at that very moment. Victory didn't matter now. She did!
Faraaz Kazi
#23. RVM's Thought for the Day - Everybody Counts- the Happy ones Count their Blessings and the sad ones Count their Troubles.
R.v.m.
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. The world of men and women are making merry in the cemetery grounds. They are having sexual intercourse, God bless them, and I am alone in the Land of Fuck.
Henry Miller
#30. There has been a change in heroes within the working-class community
David Riesman
#31. The modern suburb is the product of the car, the five-day week, and the "bankers' hours" of the masses.
David Riesman
#32. 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
#33. If anything remains more or less unchanged, it will be the role of women.
David Riesman
#34. Give me your honest opinion. I don't want truth with a veil on - I like naked ladies naked.
Christina Stead
