David Riesman (September 22, 1909 – May 10, 2002) was a sociologist, educator, and best-selling commentator on American society.
Men are created different; they lose their social freedom and their individual autonomy in seeking to become like each other.
The premonition of death may for many be a stimulus to novelty of experience: the imminence of death serves to sweep away the inessential preoccupations for those who do not flee from the thought of death into triviality.
Today the future occupation of all moppets is to be skilled consumers.
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.
The situation of the factory worker today is reminiscent in certain respects of that of the nineteenth-century capitalist whose wife dragged him reluctantly toward "culture" and away from his "materialistic" preoccupations.
The modern suburb is the product of the car, the five-day week, and the "bankers' hours" of the masses.
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.
Drivers in a traffic jam, frustrated by each others presence, are not the most amiable of men.
It is among the less privileged groups relatively new to leisure and consumption that the zest for possessions retains something of its pristine energy.
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.
Nowadays, truth is the greatest news. The mass media are the wholesalers, the peer groups, the retailers of the communications industry.
If anything remains more or less unchanged, it will be the role of women.
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.
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?
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.
There has been a change in heroes within the working-class community
The ethical regime [of the Jews] was quite definitely Ptolemaic, revolving around the small group of Jews, not the larger Gentile group and, accordingly, they learned to remain unimpressed by Gentile temporal power. Being unimpressed did not mean being unafraid material power might beat or starve one to death; it did mean refusing to surrender moral hegemony to the majority merely because it had power.
If you want to get out of medicine the fullest enjoyment, be students all your lives.
Etiquette can be at the same time a means of approaching people and of staying clear of them.
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.