Edgar Friedenberg quotes:

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

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

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.

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

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.

Romance, like alcohol, should be enjoyed but must not be allowed to become necessary.

Part of the American dream is to live long and die young.

It takes a kind of shabby arrogance to survive in our time, and a fairly romantic nature to want to.

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

It is idle to talk of civil liberties to adults who were systematically taught in adolescence that they had none; and it is sheer hypocrisy to call such people freedom loving.

All weakness tends to corrupt, and impotence corrupts absolutely.

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.

Those who love the young best stay young longer.

The examined life has always been pretty well confined to a privileged class.

Not only do most people accept violence if it is perpetuated by legitimate authority, they also regard violence against certain kinds of people as inherently legitimate, no matter who commits it.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.