[Americans] expect to eat and stay thin, to be constantly on the move and ever more neighborly...to revere God and be God.
A sign of celebrity is often that their name is worth more than their services.
As individuals and as a nation, we now suffer from social narcissism. The beloved Echo of our ancestors, the virgin America, has been abandoned. We have fallen in love with our own image, with images of our making, which turn out to be images of ourselves.
Celebrity worship and hero worship should not be confused. Yet we confuse them every day, and by doing so we come dangerously close to depriving ourselves of all real models. We lose sight of the men and women who do not simply seem great because they are famous but who are famous because they are great.
Education is learning what you didn't even know you didn't know.
Human models are more vivid and more persuasive than explicit moral commands.
I have observed that the world has suffered far less from ignorance than from pretensions to knowledge. It is not skeptics or explorers but fanatics and ideologues who menace decency and progress. No agnostic ever burned anyone at the stake or tortured a pagan, a heretic, or an unbeliever.
I write to discover what I think. After all, the bars aren't open that early.
Knowledge is not simply another commodity. On the contrary. Knowledge is never used up. It increases by diffusion and grows by dispersion.
Nothing is really real unless it happens on television.
Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some hire PR officers.
The celebrity is a person who is known for his well-knownness.
The deeper problems connected with advertising come less from the unscrupulousness of our 'deceivers' than from our pleasure in being deceived, less from the desire to seduce than from the desire to be seduced.
The force of the advertising word and image dwarfs the power of other literature in the 20th century.
The greatest obstacle to discovering the shape of the earth, the continents, and the oceans was not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge.
The traveler was active; he went strenuously in search of people, of adventure, of experience. The tourist is passive; he expects interesting things to happen to him. He goes "sight-seeing."
The world of crime is a last refuge of the authentic, uncorrupted, spontaneous event.
We easily forget that smog is the price of freedom of our streets from manure, and from the flies and diseases it brought.
We suffer primarily not from our vices or our weaknesses, but from our illusions. We are haunted, not by reality, but by those images we have put in their place.