“One of the key characteristics of an elite corps is its susceptibility to those more powerful than itself. Elite power is naturally attracted to a power hierarchy and fits itself neatly, obediently into the one that promises the most personal benefits. Here is the Achilles’ heel of armies, police and bureaucracies.”
Source: The White Plague
“Bureaucracies are a strange beast whose only goal is obesity.”
Source: The Southerners Guide To Surviving New York City: How not to get yourself killed.
“Sometimes he would rather battle a demon from Hell than grapple with the bureaucracy of man.”
Source: Vocation of a Gadfly
“Spectacle is the sun that never sets over the empire of modern passivity”
Source: The Society of the Spectacle
“The standards of beauty in America's über-culture are purposefully set too high so that we will buy anything in our frantic scramble to become attractive. We are meant to feel crushed, inadequate, and less-than so that we'll buy more and more things in the vain hope of "fixing" ourselves.”
Source: Hello Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks & Other Outlaws
“A consumerism credo is a poor substitute for liberty, human dignity, and personal integrity; pursing a hedonistic and materialistic lifestyle proved spiritually enslaving. Rather than pointing its aim at raising the moral consciousness of individual persons and our community, consumerism gives its blessing to basking in wanton self-indulgence”
Source: Dead Toad Scrolls
“Consumerism is not bad, but reckless and mindless consumerism is not just bad, but downright injurious to the health of not just the individual, but of the entire society.”
“Everybody looks for an identity; that's human nature - and it's especially true about young people. But that's why the ultimate sacrifice is to give up your individuality for the sake of the team. We can only be successful when everyone understands that the whole is bigger than the sum of its parts, but we will never get there if everyone is looking to carve out a little place for themselves, to steal her own identity at the expense of everyone else.”
Source: Standing Tall: A Memoir of Tragedy and Triumph
“The conventional way of understanding taste, according to Distinction, is to view it as a capacity for aesthetic judgments in areas such as music, art, and literature. Though rarely made explicit, it is well understood that taste can be found only among the elite, and that the lower classes lack it. Bourdieu argues that it is imperative to break with this concept of taste and replace it with one that is sociological in nature. In order to do so, Bourdieu expands the concept of taste from including only "aesthetic consumption" to including "ordinary consumption," that is, the consumption of clothing, furniture, and food ([1979] 1986:100). He also extends the concept of taste to all social classes, and shows that what constitutes "good taste" is very much part of the struggle for domination in society.”
Source: Principles of Economic Sociology
“As an explanation tool, the concept of class serves, first and foremost, to clarify who gains and who losses from specific economic processes and policies and with what consequences.”
Source: Economic Sociology: A Systematic Inquiry