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. The temperature of my blood dropped several degrees, and I took a step back. My heart quickened. "Storm?" I prompted, looking at the boxes on the dock labeled "non-perishable.

Kirby Howell

#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. What were we talking before I was so rudely interrupted by a flying citrus ?

Joss Stirling

#6. I'm a member of the Primitive Baptist Church, and they will buy every CD that I have released, but they don't me just to bring the instruments much into the church.

Ralph Stanley

#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. To understand and be understood is to be at peace

Kamand Kojouri

#13. Etiquette can be at the same time a means of approaching people and of staying clear of them.

David Riesman

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

David Riesman

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

David Riesman

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. Comedy clubs can be brutal. Those people are for real, and if you aren't funny, they aren't laughing. They don't care who you are.

Marlon Wayans

#19. 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

#20. It's much easier to have something that's absolutely definite and has a definite identity, rather than a really generic role.

Scarlett Alice Johnson

#21. Heaven's eternal wisdom has decreed, that man should ever stand in need of man.

Theocritus

#22. 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

#23. I do not crave this
But he needed it before he became a danger to himself and others.

J.R. Ward

#24. If anything remains more or less unchanged, it will be the role of women.

David Riesman

#25. You don't take food home from restaurants in Sweden.

Greg Poehler

#26. To me this out-of-the way corner was always a wonderful and a mysterious place, where my castles in the air stood close together in radiant rows, and where the strangest and most splendid adventures befell me; for the hours I passed in it and the people I met in it were all enchanted.

Elizabeth Von Arnim

#27. 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

#28. Media are means of extending and enlarging our organic sense lives into our environment.

Marshall McLuhan

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

David Riesman

#30. There has been a change in heroes within the working-class community

David Riesman

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. 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

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. People come in and out of our lives continually. Some are blessings, some are lessons, and on rare occasions, they're both.

Anonymous

#37. Funding for the original manned Voyager Mars Program was scratched in 1968, before humans had gotten out of Low Earth Orbit. Mid-'60s plans for a Venus fly-by with astronauts actually flying by it met the same fate.

P. J. O'Rourke

#38. Can you imagine, in a world so afraid of otherness, why this would be a danger to all peculiar-kind?

Ransom Riggs

#39. Nowadays, truth is the greatest news. The mass media are the wholesalers, the peer groups, the retailers of the communications industry.

David Riesman

#40. If you want to get out of medicine the fullest enjoyment, be students all your lives.

David Riesman