...everything is too important ever to be entrusted to professional experts, because every organization of such professionals and every established read more

...everything is too important ever to be entrusted to professional experts, because every organization of such professionals and every established social organization becomes a vested-interest institution more concerned with its efforts to maintain itself or advance its own interests than to achieve the purpose that society expects it to achieve.

We must think of human progress, not as of something going on in the race in general, but as something read more

We must think of human progress, not as of something going on in the race in general, but as something going on in a small minority, perpetually beleaguered in a few walled towns. Now and then the horde of barbarians outside breaks through, and we have an armed effort to halt the process. That is, we have a Reformation, a French Revolution, a war for democracy, a Great Awakening. The minority is decimated and driven to cover. But a few survive- and a few are enough to carry on.

You cannot criticize the New Testament. It criticizes you.

You cannot criticize the New Testament. It criticizes you.

A rising mass movement attracts and holds a following not by its doctrine and promises but by the refuge it read more

A rising mass movement attracts and holds a following not by its doctrine and promises but by the refuge it offers from the anxieties, barrenness and meaningless of an individual existence. It cures the poignantly frustrated not by conferring upon them an absolute truth or by remedying the difficulties and abuses which made their lives miserable, but by freeing them from their ineffectual selves- and it does this by enfolding and absorbing them into a closely knit and exultant corporate whole.

In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves:
the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of read more

In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves:
the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy.

We often despise what is most useful to us.

We often despise what is most useful to us.

Society knows perfectly well how to kill a man and has methods more subtle than death

Society knows perfectly well how to kill a man and has methods more subtle than death

Society is like a lawn where every roughness is smoothed, every bramble eradicated, and where the eye is delighted by read more

Society is like a lawn where every roughness is smoothed, every bramble eradicated, and where the eye is delighted by the smiling verdure of a velvet surface.

Society is joint action and cooperation in which each participant sees the other partner's success as a means for the read more

Society is joint action and cooperation in which each participant sees the other partner's success as a means for the attainment of his own.