David Riesman
Sociologist
1909-09-22
Books by David Riesman
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Abundance for what? And others essays
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The vanishing adolescent
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Quotes by David Riesman
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...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?
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...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?
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It is among the less privileged groups relatively new to leisure and consumption that the zest for possessions retains something of its pristine energy.
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Drivers in a traffic jam, frustrated by each others presence, are not the most amiable of men.
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Today the future occupation of all moppets is to be skilled consumers.
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We have become a conservative country, despite our worldwide reputation for seeking novelty, in that we are unable to envisage alternative futures for ourselves.
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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.
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Men are created different; they lose their social freedom and their individual autonomy in seeking to become like each other.
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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.
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Mass entertainment in America has been dominated for a long time by the mode of documentary realism.
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A decline of exuberance is just barely noticeable in America, making itself felt particularly among the most highly educated and the well-to-do in a loss of appetite for work and perhaps even for leisure.
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Our society offers little in the way of reeducation for those who have been torn away from their traditional culture and suddenly exposed to all the blandishments of mass culture-even the churches which follow the hillbillies to the city often make use of the same hard sell that the advertisers and politicians do.
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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.
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There has been a change in heroes within the working-class community
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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.
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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.
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Etiquette can be at the same time a means of approaching people and of staying clear of them.
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The modern suburb is the product of the car, the five-day week, and the bankers' hours of the masses.
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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.
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Words not only affect us temporarily; they change us, they socialize or unsocialize us.
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