This strange disease of modern life, with its sick hurry, its divided aims.

Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things.

It seems a long time since the morning mail could be called correspondence.

Society is one vast conspiracy for carving one into the kind of statue likes, and then placing it in the most convenient niche it has.

The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Our is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.

You can't make up anything anymore. The world itself is a satire. All you're doing is recording it.

It is not a fragrant world.

Our individual lives cannot, generally, be works of art unless the social order is also.

A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.

We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork.

The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that man may become robots.

Most of the change we think we see in life Is due to truths being in and out of favor.

There is more to life than increasing its speed.

The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy: neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.

Think what a better world it would be if we all, the whole world, had cookies and milk about three o'clock every afternoon and then lay down on our blankets for a nap.

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

You can find your way across this country using burger joints the way a navigator uses stars.

Civilization is unbearable, but it is less unbearable at the top.

Perhaps in time the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including our own.

Society honors its living conformists and its dead troublemakers.

Today the world changes so quickly that in growing up we take leave not just of youth but of the world we were young in.

Society has always seemed to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.

In these times you have to be an optimist to open your eyes when you awake in the morning.

Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty; what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.

How can a society that exists on instant mashed potatoes, packaged cake mixes, frozen dinners, and instant cameras teach patience to its young?

Punishment is now unfashionable... because it creates moral distinctions among men, which, to the democratic mind, are odious. We prefer a meaningless collective guilt to a meaningful individual responsibility.

Formerly, when religion was strong and science weak, men mistook magic for medicine; now, when science is strong and religion weak, men mistake medicine for magic.

What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?

One of the definitions of sanity is the ability to tell real from unreal. Soon we'll need a new definition.

The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat.

The human race's prospects of survival were considerably better when we were defenceless against tigers than they are today when we have become defenceless against ourselves.

Man is the animal that intends to shoot himself out into interplanetary space, after having given up on the problem of an efficient way to get himself five miles to work and back each day.

Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them.

The world is governed more by appearance than realities so that it is fully as necessary to seem to know something as to know it.