Quotes

"Just when we are moving to an ever greater validation of the sacredness of the individual person, our capacity to imagine a social fabric that would hold individuals together is vanishing. This is in part because [our] religious individualism is linked to an economic individualism which, ironically, knows nothing of the sacredness of the individual. Its only standard is money, and the only thing more sacred than money is--more money."

—UC-Berkeley sociologist Robert Bellah, quoted by Washington Post columnist William Raspberry, April 10

"[I]t's free-market conservatives who are the closest thing to Marxists on the scene today. Like Marxists, they believe they have found the `answer' to the economic puzzles of our time.

"The intellectual arrogance is stunning and, as it did with Marxists, that arrogance leaves zealots willing to make people suffer for their cause. Yes, NAFTA might throw you out of work and ruin your life, they say, but in the long term it's for the best--trust us, we have a theory."

—Jay Stanley, in a letter to the editor of The Washington Post, April