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.

Today Americans are overcome not by the sense of endless possibility but by the banality of the social order they have erected against it.

Relentless improvement of the product and upgrading of consumer tastes are the heart of mass merchandising.

It is advertising and the logic of consumerism that governs the depiction of reality in the mass media.

The family is a haven in a heartless world.

Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.

The attempt to redefine the family as a purely voluntary arrangement grows out of the modern delusion that people can keep all their options open all the time.

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.

Progressive rhetoric has the effect of concealing social crisis and moral breakdown by presenting them as the birth pangs of a new order.

George Orwell's contention was that it is a sure sign of trouble when things can no longer be called by their right names and described in plain, forthright speech.

The effect of the mass media is not to elicit belief but to maintain the apparatus of addiction.

You certainly believe in the power of love. And throughout the series, you see how love shows itself in ways that mirror the best of who we are.

Discipline is rarely enjoyable, but almost always profitable.

I suffer migraines. I do not suffer fools.

I always think its easier for me to write without thinking about the strict meter that's required for songs and song structures and things like that. It's much easier to just write on the page.

Turning the blog into a book was extremely difficult, a tremendous amount of sustained, hard work. Blogging is easy; writing a book is difficult.

I question whether I want to be integrated into America as it stands now, with its complacency and materialism, its soullessness.

I'm inspired by challenges. My life was always like this.

He who can preserve gentleness amid pains, and peace amid worry multitude of affairs, is almost perfect.

When you work for something, you appreciate it more. So what are y'all going to do with all the opportunities you inherited that you didn't have to work for?

How quickly nature falls into revolt When gold becomes her object! For this the foolish over-careful fathers Have broke their sleep with thoughts, their brains with care, Their bones with industry.