David Riesman

“The sources of direction for the individual are 'inner-directed' in the sense that they are implanted early in life by the elders and directed toward generalized but nonetheless inescapably destined goals.”

“The problem for the other-directed person is not the problem of rising in a rigid hierarchy, but the problem of being popular.”

“The tradition-directed person feels the impact of his culture as a unit, but it is nevertheless a unit which has been filtered by the rigid lens of tradition.”

“The lonely crowd is not a book about the unchanging character of Americans, but about the way it is changing.”

“The other-directed person is cosmopolitan. For him, the home is not the zone of the intimate, but a staging area for his forays into the world.”

“While the inner-directed person could be governed in his conduct by a gyroscope, the other-directed person is governed by a radar.”

“What is feared is not failure, but success. Almost any form of success is feared because it asks for still more success.”

“No one can say with finality that the other-directed person is 'happier' than the inner-directed person.”

“Americans are not only gregarious, they are compulsively so.”

“Leisure, which was once a residual category in the lives of the middle and upper classes, has become a major problem.”

“The other-directed child is taught at school to be a good group member, to be well-adjusted, and to be popular.”

“Autonomy is not the same as freedom... Autonomy is the capacity to choose, whereas freedom is the absence of external constraint.”

“Power in America today is situational; celebrities, wealthy people, politicians, journalists, generals, criminals... gain and lose power.”

“The peer-group becomes the measure of all things; the individual has few defenses against the expectations of the group.”

“The media ask for more and more production, and it gets harder and harder to do. The exhausted producer lives in a state of perpetual anxiety.”