The proper role of humanists is not to bring 'human values' to the attention of technicians otherwise engaged in a purely instrumental approach to their calling, but to demand the restoration of the practical or moral element in callings that have degenerated into techniques.
Today Americans are overcome not by the sense of endless possibility but by the banality of the social order they have erected against it.
Ostensibly rigorous and realistic, contemporary conservatism is an ideology of denial. Its symbol is a smile button.
I despise the cowardly clinging to life, purely for the sake of life, that seems so deeply ingrained in the American temperament.
A child's appetite for new toys appeal to the desire for ownership and appropriation: the appeal of toys comes to lie not in their use but in their status as possessions.
The news appeals to the same jaded appetite that makes a child tire of a toy as soon as it becomes familiar and demand a new one in its place.
The left has lost the common touch.
The left sees nothing but bigotry and superstition in the popular defense of the family or in popular attitudes regarding abortion, crime, busing, and the school curriculum.
The intellectual debility of contemporary conservatism is indicated by its silence on all important matters.
Most people no longer live in nuclear families at all.
Adherents of the new religious right reject the separation of politics and religion, but they bring no spiritual insights to politics.
Traditionalists will have to master techniques of sustained activism formerly monopolized by the left.
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.
The best defense against the terror of existence are the homely comforts of love, work, and family life, which connect us to a world that is independent of our wishes yet responsive to our needs.
Liberals subscribe to the new flexible, pluralistic definition of the family; their defense of families carries no conviction.
The same historical development that turned the citizen into a client transformed the worker from a producer into a consumer.
When liberals finally grasped the strength of popular feeling about the family, they cried to appropriate the rhetoric and symbolism of family values for their own purposes.
Personal disintegration remains always an imminent danger.
Drugs are merely the most obvious form of addiction in our society. Drug addiction is one of the things that undermines traditional values.
Democracy in our time is more likely to die of indifference than of intolerance.
The hope of a new politics does not lie in formulating a left-wing reply to the right-it lies in rejecting conventional political categories.
Knowledge is what we get when an observer, preferably a scientifically trained observer, provides us with a copy of reality that we can all recognize.
Because politics rests on an irreducible measure of coercion, it can never become a perfect realm of perfect love and justice.
Even the reporting of news has to be understood not as propaganda for any particular ideology, liberal or conservative, but as propaganda for commodities — for the replacement of things by commodities, use values by exchange values, and events by images.
It is no longer an unwritten law of American capitalism that industry will attempt to maintain wages at a level that allows a single wage to support a family.
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