“This is what makes packaged opinion so attractive.”

— Saul Bellow

"There Is Simply Too Much to Think About" (1992), pp. 173-174
It All Adds Up (1994)
Context: There is simply too much to think about. It is hopeless — too many kinds of special preparation are required. In electronics, in economics, in social analysis, in history, in psychology, in international politics, most of us are, given the oceanic proliferating complexity of things, paralyzed by the very suggestion that we assume responsibility for so much. This is what makes packaged opinion so attractive.

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Saul Bellow103

Canadian-born American writer 1915–2005

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“[Television, radio, and magazines] are so designed as to make thinking seem unnecessary (though this is only an appearance). The packaging of intellectual positions and views is one of the most active enterprises of some of the best minds of our day. The viewer of television, the listener to radio, the reader of magazines, is presented with a whole complex of elements—all the way from ingenious rhetoric to carefully selected data and statistics—to make it easy for him to “make up his own mind” with the minimum of difficulty and effort. But the packaging is often done so effectively that the viewer, listener, or reader does not make up his own mind at all. Instead, he inserts a packaged opinion into his mind, somewhat like inserting a cassette into a cassette player. He then pushes a button and “plays back” the opinion whenever it seems appropriate to do so. He has performed acceptably without having had to think.”

Mortimer J. Adler book How to Read a Book

Source: How to Read a Book (1940, 1972), p. 4

“The same trend can be seen in personal relationships, in the way people are expected to package themselves, their emotions and sexuality in attractive and instantly appealing forms.”

J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) British writer

Notes to The Atrocity Exhibition (1970; written 1967 - 1969, annotated 1990)
Context: All over the world major museums have bowed to the influence of Disney and become theme parks in their own right. The past, whether Renaissance Italy or ancient Egypt, is reassimilated and homogenized into its most digestible form. Desperate for the new, but disappointed with anything but the familiar, we recolonise past and future. The same trend can be seen in personal relationships, in the way people are expected to package themselves, their emotions and sexuality in attractive and instantly appealing forms.

“What makes the spectacle of Western bourgeois society so repulsive is the waste and squander of resources on needless products of status or display (e. g., the large, heavy automobile; the extravagant packaging of consumer items) for the sake of consumption.”

Daniel Bell book The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

Source: The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976), Chapter 6, The Public Household, p. 274

“Somewhere we taught ourselves that our opinions are more significant than the facts. And somehow we get our egos and our opinions and Truth all mixed up in a single package, so that when something does challenge one of the notions to which we subscribe, we react as if it challenges us.”

Jack McDevitt (1935) American novelist, Short story writer

Source: Academy Series - Priscilla "Hutch" Hutchins, Omega (2003), Chapter 41 (p. 404)

“At very best, a person wrapped up in himself makes a small package.”

Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878–1969) American pastor

A very similar statement has become attributed to Benjamin Franklin, but apparently only in recent decades: "A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small bundle." This seems to have been first attributed to Franklin in The New Age Magazine Vol. 66 (1958), and the earliest appearance of it yet located is in Coronet magazine, Vol. 34 (1953), p. 27, where it was attributed to a Louise Stein.
On Being a Real Person (1943)

“What makes big boobs and perkiness so attractive to boys? I mean, really. Two round, mounds of fat and a fake smile. Yeah, winning attributes.”

Gena Showalter (1975) American writer

Source: Oh My Goth

“Events in the past may be roughly divided into those which probably never happened and those which do not matter. This is what makes the trade of historian so attractive.”

William Ralph Inge (1860–1954) Dean of St Pauls

Assessments and Anticipations, "Prognostications" (1929)

“It was the realization that, if packaged the correct way, the news could make you big bucks.”

Jesse Ventura (1951) American politician and former professional wrestler

Source: Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! (2008), Ch. 3 (p. 48)
Context: The media today are controlled by the big corporations. It's all about ratings and money. Believe it or not, I think the downfall of our press today was the show 60 Minutes. Up until it came along, news was expected to lose money, in order to bring the people fair reporting and the truth. But when 60 Minutes became the top-rated program on television, the light went on. The corporate honchos said, "Wait a minute, you mean if we entertain with the news, we can make money?" It was the realization that, if packaged the correct way, the news could make you big bucks. No longer was it a matter of scooping somebody else on a story, but whether 20/20's ratings this week were better than Dateline's. I'm not knocking 60 Minutes. It was tremendously well done and hugely successful, but in the long run it could end up being a detriment to society.

“And what he fears he cannot make attractive with his touch he abandons.”
Et quae Desperat tractata nitescere posse relinquit.

Horace Ars Poetica

Source: Ars Poetica, or The Epistle to the Pisones (c. 18 BC), Line 149 (tr. H. R. Fairclough)

“Just as dyed hair makes older men less attractive, it is what you do to hide your weaknesses that makes them repugnant.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 68

“This is what makes packaged opinion so attractive.”

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