David Riesman quotes
The ethical regime [of the Jews] was quite definitely Ptolemaic, revolving around the small group of Jews, not the larger Gentile group-and, accordingly, they learned to remain unimpressed by Gentile temporal power. Being unimpressed did not mean being unafraid-material power might beat or starve one to death; it did mean refusing to surrender moral hegemony to the majority merely because it had power.
David Riesman
If we observe the aging of individuals, in the period after middle life, it seems to me that we can distinguish three ideal-typical outcomes. Some individuals bear within themselves some psychological sources of self-renewal; aging brings for them accretions of wisdom, with no loss of spontaneity and ability to enjoy life, and they are relatively independent of the culture's strictures and penalties imposed on the aged. Other individuals, possibly the majority, bear within them no such resources but are the beneficiaries of a cultural preservative (derived from work, power, position, etc.) which sustains them although only so long as the cultural conditions remain stable and protective. A third group, protected neither from within nor from without, simply decay. In terms more fully delineated elsewhere, we may have autonomous, adjusted, and anomic reactions to aging.
David Riesman
The Autonomous. In the case of someone like Bertrand Russell or Toscanini, one feels an essential aliveness of spirit that reflexively keeps the body alive too, in the face of the inevitable physiological catabolisms. ... Such men are not necessarily "balanced” or "well-adjusted” people: they may ... get along well with very few people, or prefer the "company” of dead people. ... One can see in such cases a passionate interest or preoccupation which has remained alive since childhood-though perhaps newly justified or rediscovered in middle life. ... Such individuals are fairly immune to cultural changes, or to cultural definitions of their own physical changes: they carry their preservative, their "spirits,” within. ... As long as the body does not actively prevent, these men are immortal because of their ability to renew themselves.
David Riesman
A spurious democracy has influenced both our research methods (I am sometimes tempted to define "validity” as part of the context of an experiment demanding so little in the way of esoteric gift that any number can play at it, provided they have taken a certain number of courses) and our research subjects (it would be deemed snobbish to investigate only the best people).
David Riesman
