How we cite our quotes: (Part.Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #4
It is a rare house or building that is not rigged with spiky combers of the air. Radio and television speech becomes standardized, perhaps better English than we have ever used. Just as our bread, mixed and baked, packaged and sold without benefit of accident or human frailty, is uniformly good and uniformly tasteless, so will our speech become one speech. (2.5.80)
Again, Steinbeck is worried about how a nation of rich dialects and accents will get homogenized through the influences coming into our homes through the "spiky combers of the air" (antennae). He needn't have worried about English becoming "better English than we have ever used," though. That doesn't seem to have happened.
Quote #5
Of course the Deep South holds on by main strength to its regional expressions, just as it holds and treasures some other anachronisms, but no region can hold out for long against the highway, the high-tension line, and the national television. What I am mourning is perhaps not worth saving, but I regret its loss nevertheless. (2.5.81)
Oh, right, and the highways—those are the other big villains in Steinbeck's universe, in terms of changes for the worse. Steinbeck seems to loathe highways, since they are crowded and not very scenic. He does admit that some of his resistance to change and nostalgia for the old days might not have a solid basis, but he still laments a lot of the changes that mass communication and highways have brought to America.
Quote #6
It is the nature of a man as he grows older, a small bridge in time, to protest against change, particularly change for the better. But it is true that we have exchanged corpulence for starvation, and either one will kill us. The lines of change are down. We, or at least I, can have no conception of human life and human thought in a hundred years or fifty years. Perhaps my greatest wisdom is the knowledge that I do not know. The sad ones are those who waste their energy in trying to hold it back, for they can only feel bitterness in loss and no joy in gain. (2.5.53)
Steinbeck seems to be trying hard not to be a curmudgeon about change—or, at least, to be self-aware about being a curmudgeon—but he still stands by his assertion that we've replaced certain ills or problems with new ones, like "corpulence for starvation." But he does admit that, really, at the end of the day, he doesn't really know anything about what the world will or should look like. By being humble like that, he kind of redeems himself from straight-up curmudgeon status.