“If the world is to save any part of its resources for the future, it must reduce not only consumption but the number of consumers.”

A piece of music is an experience to be taken by itself.

The speaker does not feel the grammatical rules he is said to apply in composing sentences, and men spoke grammatically for thousands of years before anyone knew there were rules.

Behavior is determined by its consequences.

Unable to understand how or why the person we see behaves as he does, we attribute his behavior to a person we cannot see, whose behavior we cannot explain either but about whom we are not inclined to ask questions.

Teachers must learn how to teach they need only to be taught more effective ways of teaching.

But restraint is the only one sort of control, and absence of restraint isn’t freedom. It’s not control that’s lacking when one feels ‘free’, but the objectionable control of force.

Do not intervene between a person and the consequences of their own behavior.

Give me a child and I’ll shape him into anything.

We are only just beginning to understand the power of love because we are just beginning to understand the weakness of force and aggression.

Those who have had anything useful to say have said it far too often, and those who have had nothing to say have been no more reticent.

If you’re old, don’t try to change yourself, change your environment.

Science, not religion, has taught me my most useful values, among them intellectual honesty. It is better to go without answers than to accept those that merely resolve puzzlement.

Society already possesses the psychological techniques needed to obtain universal observance of a code – a code which would guarantee the success of a community or state. The difficulty is that these techniques are in the hands of the wrong people-or, rather, there aren’t any right people.

The major difference between rats and people is that rats learn from experience.

We shouldn’t teach great books; we should teach a love of reading. Knowing the contents of a few works of literature is a trivial achievement. Being inclined to go on reading is a great achievement.

Men build society and society builds men.

The entrepreneurs, the capitalists and the technologists prosper as far as they succeed in best supplying the consumers.

All production is for the purpose of ultimately satisfying a consumer.

Culture is a perversion. It fetishizes objects, creates consumer mania, it preaches endless forms of false happiness, endless forms of false understanding in the form of squirrelly religions and silly cults. It invites people to diminish themselves and dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines.

If the government was as afraid of disturbing the consumer as it is of disturbing business, this would be some democracy.

The real bosses, in the capitalist system of market economy, are the consumers.

A BOUNTY on the exportation of corn tends to lower its price to the foreign consumer, but it has no permanent effect on its price in the home market.

It was a real education, going right from the consumer end to the record factory.

There is the desire of a consumer society to have no learning curves.