The same historical development that turned the citizen into a client transformed the worker from a producer into a consumer.

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.

Boys. Drau or mortal, they were all the same.

Science can improve lives in ways that are elegant in design and moving in practice.

My friend, the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, was murdered in 2004 for having been insufficiently reverent toward Islam.

The amount of God's love is unlimited, but we only receive as much as we use.

We can and do control the direction of our own evolution.

I'm not a 21-year-old angsty self-destructive rapscallion anymore.

I could have been a great many things.

I like consistency. If you've had a childhood like mine, you want some things you can rely on to stay the same.

We clasp the hands of those who go before us.

My short stories have always pushed twenty pages. That's no length for a short story to be. You either do them short like Carver or you stop trying.