Edgar Friedenberg Quotes

Only science can hope to keep technology in some sort of moral order.

Every major industrial society believes it has a serious youth problem.

Juvenile delinquency serves many purposes, including that of providing sadistic adults with fantasies suited to their special tastes.

What we must decide is how we are valuable rather than how valuable we are.

The teenager seems to have replaced the Communist as the appropriate target for public controversy and foreboding.

The atmosphere [in the school lunchroom] is not quite that of a prison, because the students are permitted to talk quietly, under the frowning scrutiny of teachers standing around on duty, during their meal-they are not supposed to talk while standing in line, though this rule is only sporadically enforced.

If a people have no word for something, either it does not matter to them or it matters too much to talk about.

Canadians are more polite when they are being rude than Americans are when they are being friendly.

No American is prepared to attend his own funeral without the services of highly skilled cosmeticians. Part of the American dream, after all, is to live long and die young.

Most Americans would say that they disapproved of violence. But what they really mean is that they believe it should be the monopoly of the state.

In a world as empirical as ours, a youngster who does not know what he is good at will not be sure what he is good for.

Human life is a continuous thread which each of us spins to his own pattern, rich and complex in meaning. There are no natural knots in it. Yet knots form, nearly always in adolescence.

What is learned in high school, or for that matter anywhere at all, depends far less on what is taught than on what one actually experiences in the place.

Adolescents tend to be passionate people, and passion is no less real because it is directed toward a hot-rod, a commercialized popular singer, or the leader of a black-jacketed gang.