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The premonition of death may for many be a stimulus to novelty of experience: the imminence of death serves to sweep away the inessential preoccupations for those who do not flee from the thought of death into triviality.

David Riesman

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David Riesman
Age: 92 †
Born: 1909
Born: September 22
Died: 2002
Died: May 10
Lawyer
Sociologist
University Teacher
Writer
Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
May
Preoccupation
Many
Stimulus
Novelty
Inessential
Serves
Preoccupations
Experience
Premonition
Death
Triviality
Away
Sweep
Thought
Flee

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Look at all the sentences which seem true and question them.
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Our society offers little in the way of reeducation for those who have been torn away from their traditional culture and suddenly exposed to all the blandishments of mass culture-even the churches which follow the hillbillies to the city often make use of the same hard sell that the advertisers and politicians do.
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It is no longer clear which way is up even if one wants to rise.
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Drivers in a traffic jam, frustrated by each others presence, are not the most amiable of men.
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In preindustrial cultures leisure is scarcely a burden or a problem because it is built into the ritual and ground plan of life for which people are conditioned in childhood often they possess a relatively timeless attitude toward events.
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Etiquette can be at the same time a means of approaching people and of staying clear of them.
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The closest thing we have to the traditional ideology of the leisure class is a group of artists and intellectuals who regard their work as play and their play as work.
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The situation of the factory worker today is reminiscent in certain respects of that of the nineteenth-century capitalist whose wife dragged him reluctantly toward culture and away from his materialistic preoccupations.
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It is among the less privileged groups relatively new to leisure and consumption that the zest for possessions retains something of its pristine energy.
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If you want to get out of medicine the fullest enjoyment, be students all your lives.
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Nowadays, truth is the greatest news. The mass media are the wholesalers, the peer groups, the retailers of the communications industry.
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It is not new for the older generation to bewail the indolence of the young, and there is a tendency for the latter to maintain much of the older ethic screened by a new semantics and an altered ideology.
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There is evidence that young men in the big law firms, although they still work harder than most of their clients, do not glory in putting in night work and weekend hours as they once did.
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Though top executives may work as hard as ever-in part perhaps because, being trained in an earlier day, they can hardly help doing so-their subordinates are somewhat less work-minded.
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The modern suburb is the product of the car, the five-day week, and the bankers' hours of the masses.
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Those who are excluded from meaningful work are, by an large, excluded from meaningful play.
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If anything remains more or less unchanged, it will be the role of women.
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Today the future occupation of all moppets is to be skilled consumers.
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Why, I ask, isn't it possible that advertising as a whole is a fantastic fraud, presenting an image of America taken seriously by no one, least of all by the advertising men who create it?
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The media, far from being a conspiracy to dull the political sense of the people, could be viewed as a conspiracy to disguise the extent of political indifference.
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