As individuals and as a nation, we now suffer from social narcissism. The beloved Echo of our ancestors, the virgin America, has been abandoned. We have fallen in love with our own image, with images of our making, which turn out to be images of ourselves.

An image is not simply a trademark, a design, a slogan or an easily remembered picture. It is a studiously crafted personality profile of an individual, institution, corporation, product or service.

Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some hire public relations officers.

As you make your bed, so you must lie in it.

The force of the advertising word and image dwarfs the power of other literature in the 20th century.

A best-seller was a book which somehow sold well because it was selling well.

Human models are more vivid and more persuasive than explicit moral commands.

We need not be theologians to see that we have shifted responsibility for making the world interesting from God to the newspaperman.

I’ve learned any fool can write a bad ad, but it takes a real genius to keep his hands off a good one.

Freedom means the opportunity to be what we never thought we would be.

The courage to imagine the otherwise is our greatest resource, adding color and suspense to all our life.

A sign of celebrity is that his name is often worth more than his services.

I write to discover what I think. After all, the bars aren’t open that early.

Education is learning what you didn’t even know you didn’t know.

Knowledge is not simply another commodity. On the contrary. Knowledge is never used up. It increases by diffusion and grows by dispersion.

Reading is like the sex act – done privately, and often in bed.

We suffer primarily not from our vices or our weaknesses, but from our illusions. We are haunted, not by reality, but by those images we have put in their place.

The traveler was active; he went strenuously in search of people, of adventure, of experience. The tourist is passive; he expects interesting things to happen to him. He goes “sight-seeing.”

Time makes heroes but dissolves celebrities.

The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance – it is the illusion of knowledge.

We read advertisements… to discover and enlarge our desires. We are always ready – even eager – to discover, from the announcement of a new product, what we have all along wanted without really knowing it.

As individuals and as a nation, we now suffer from social narcissism. The beloved Echo of our ancestors, the virgin America, has been abandoned. We have fallen in love with our own image, with images of our making, which turn out to be images of ourselves.

Technology is so much fun but we can drown in our technology. The fog of information can drive out knowledge.

The celebrity is a person who is known for his well-knownness.

The most important American addition to the World Experience was the simple surprising fact of America. We have helped prepare mankind for all its later surprises.

Nothing is really real unless it happens on television.

A wonderful thing about a book, in contrast to a computer screen, is that you can take it to bed with you.

The world of crime is a last refuge of the authentic, uncorrupted, spontaneous event.