“The United States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the rigidity of the system of ideological control / ''indoctrination',' we might say / exercised through the mass media.”
“Unlimited economic growth has the marvelous quality of stilling discontent while maintaining privilege, a fact that has not gone unnoticed among liberal economists.”
“Sports plays a societal role in engendering jingoist and chauvinist attitudes. They're designed to organize a community to be committed to their gladiators.”
“We can imagine a society in which no one could survive as a social being because it does not correspond to biologically determined perceptions and human social needs. For historical reasons, existing societies might have such properties, leading to various forms of pathology.”
“I think there is a good reason why the propaganda system works that way. It recognizes that the public will not support the actual policies. Therefore it is important to prevent any knowledge or understanding of them.”
“Whether a person feels positive or not is kind of a comment on their personality and of no great interest. You can find positive signs or you can find negative signs. How you evaluate them depends on something that happened in your life recently or something like that. There's no objective way to do it. The important thing is you try to commit yourself to making the positive signs more real. Suppose you felt that there's 99 percent of a probability that human civilization is going to be destroyed in the next hundred years, but one percent chance it won't be, and that one percent offers some opportunities to do something. Well, you commit yourself to that one percent.”
“The principles are clear and explicit. The free market is fine for the third world and its growing counterpart at home. Mothers with dependent children can be sternly lectured on the need for self-reliance, but not dependent executives and investors, please. For them, the welfare state must flourish.”
