Because politics rests on an irreducible measure of coercion, it can never become a perfect realm of perfect love and justice.

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.

Our view of history diminishes the reality of the past. We concentrate on the historic event as something that has happened, and in so doing we ignore it as a moment which, at the time, is happening.

The earth reflects the sky and the sky meets the earth and, every now and then, if we're lucky, we have a moment to see how small we are.

pessimists see people as liabilities to manage, as burdens or threats that we must minimize.

Whatever you say about something, it is not.

Violence is sometimes a duty.

A human being becomes human not through the casual convergence of certain biological conditions, but through an act of will and love on the part of other people.

Our deeds disguise us. People need endless time to try on their deeds, until each knows the proper deeds for him to do. But every day, every hour, rushes by. There is no time.

We're seeing a decline in religion in North America but, I hope, a rise in individual spirituality. Whatever that means to people.

When they say "Be yourself," which self do they mean?

Walter Johnson's fastball looked about the size of a watermelon seed and it hissed at you as it passed.