"The problems of life are insoluble on the surface and can only be solved in depth. They are insoluble in surface dimensions." -- Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 74e, in a remark that has implications both for the individual and for society, the latter of which can be seen when the remark is applied to the current state and content of the mass media in the United States.

"Where a reporter stands in relation to a confrontation in the street ..." ... "The normal situation of the camera and reporter is behind the police who are dealing with pickets or demonstrators. This puts the viewer in a situation where he or she too is invited to see them as objects; the viewer is, as it were, identified with this position." -- Raymond Williams, On TV, p. 209-210.

"Even so far as men have not yet succumbed to political delusion, the mechanism of censorship--both internal and external--will deprive them of the means of resistance." -- Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1995), p. ix.

Foucault, in the preface to Madness and Civilization, writes that "in the serene world of mental illness, modern man no longer communicates with the madman: on one hand the man of reason delegates the physician to madness, thereby authorizing a relation only through the abstract universality of disease; on the other, the man of madness communicates with society only by the intermediary of an equally abstract reason which is order, physical and moral constraint, the anonymous pressure of the group, the requirements of conformity." -- Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Random House, 1965), p. x.

"The right kind of organization, for any cultural institution" -- including newspapers, publishing houses, and television stations -- "is one based on control by the contributors." --Raymond Williams, the British sociologist and literary critic, in his book Communications.

"All that fascinates us is the spectacle of the brain and its workings. What we are wanting here is to see our thoughts unfolding before us -- and this itself is a superstition.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, in attempting to unravel problems in the philosophy of language, exhorts the reader of Philosophical Investigations to view the phenemena in a its primitive state. "It disperses the fog," Wittgenstein says, "to study the phenomena of language in primitive kinds of application in which one can command a clear view of the aim and functioning of the words." -- Philosophical Investigations, Section 5.

Tocqueville gives great importance to the role associations play in democracy. Of the United States, he writes: "The most democratic country on the face of the earth is that in which men have, in our time, carried to the highest perfection the art of pursuing in common the object of their common desires and have applied this new science to the greatest number of purposes." -- Vol. 2, p. 107.

For Freud, dreams are a form of communication, with signs and symbols, a system of language all their own: "Even this unintelligible dream must be a fully valid psychical, with sense and worth, which we can use in analysis like any other communcation." -- Freud, Sigmund. New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1965), p. 11.

"The art of discussion ... consists principally in knowing how to place oneself at the point of view of one's partner in order to try to convince him on his own ground."-- Jean Piaget. Comments on Vygotsky's Critical Remarks Concerning The Language and Thought of the Child, and Judgment and Reasoning in the Child (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1962), p. 5.

"Observing responses to Prozac," Kramer writes, "we learn not only about ourselves but about our island's culture. ... The success of Prozac says that today's high-tech capitalism values ... confidence, flexibility, quickness, and energy" -- Kramer, Listening to Prozac, p. 297. Cf. Brown's view of capitalism as rewarding conformist character, p. 297.

"I work every day from 9:30 am to 1 p.m.; this regular workaday schedule for writing suits me better than an aleatory schedule, which supposes a state of continual excitement. ... What I do enjoy is the excitement provoked by immediate and phenomenological contact with the tutor text. ... I'm content to read the text in question, in a rather fetishistic way: writing down certain passages, moments, even words which have the power to move me. As I go along, I use my cards to write down quotations, or ideas which come to me, and they do so, curiously, already in the rhythm of a sentence, so that from that moment on, things are already taking on an existence as writing. ... From then on, I'm plunged into a kind of frenzied state. I know that everything I read will somehow find its inevitable way into my work. The only problem is to keep what I read for amusement from interfering with reading directed toward my writing. The solution is very simple: the books I read for pleasure, for example a classic, or one of Jakobson's books on linguistics, which I particularly enjoy, those I read in bed at night before going to sleep. I read the others at my worktable in the morning. ... The bed is the locus of irresponsibility. The table, that of responsibility." -- Roland Barthes, The Grain of the Voice, pp. 180-181.