Alienation Quotes - Page 2

• We are imprisoned in life in the company of persons powerfully unlike us.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Life, Company, Persons

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• Human beings are compelled to live within a lie, but they can be compelled to do so only because they are in fact capable of living in this way. Therefore not only does the system alienate humanity, but at the same time alienated humanity supports this system as its own involuntary master plan, as a degenerate image of its own degeneration, as a record of people's own failure as individuals.

  Vaclav Havel

  Lying, People, Support

  Vaclav Havel, John Keane (2016). “The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Central Eastern Europe: Citizens Against the State in Central Eastern Europe”, p.43, Routledge

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• It is really an alienation to believe that learning is the result of teaching.

  Ivan Illich

  Believe, Teaching, Results

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• When we suddenly awake to the realization that there is no barrier, and never has been, one realizes that one is all things mountains, rivers, grasses, trees, sun, moon, stars, universe are all oneself. There is no longer a division or barrier between myself and others, no longer any feeling of alienation or fear there is nothing apart from oneself and therefore nothing to fear. Realizing this results in true compassion. Other people and things are not seen as apart from oneself but, on the contrary, as one's own body.

  Bruce Lee

  Stars, Moon, Compassion

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• A hermit is simply a person to whom civilization has failed to adjust itself.

  Will Cuppy

  Civilization, Hermits, Persons

  Will Cuppy (1929). “How to be a Hermit: Or, A Bachelor Keeps House”, Castrovilli Giuseppe

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• He was so terrible that he was no longer terrible, only dehumanized.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Terrible, Dehumanization

  F. Scott Fitzgerald (2015). “The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald: Novels, Short Stories, Poetry, Articles, Letters, Plays & Screenplays: From the author of The Great Gatsby, The Side of Paradise, Tender Is the Night, The Beautiful and Damned, The Love of the Last Tycoon, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and many other notable works”, p.344, e-artnow

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• Clinton feels a profound alienation from the Washington culture here, and I happen to agree with him.

  Bob Woodward

  Agreement, Profound, Culture

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• Inability to accept the mystic experience is more than an intellectual handicap.

  Alan Watts

  Intellectual, Inability, Accepting

  Alan W. Watts, Daniel Pinchbeck (2013). “The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness”, p.112, New World Library

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• Alienation is perhaps the most effective tool of control in America, and every reminder of our real connectedness weakens that tool.

  Tim DeChristopher

  Real, America, Tools

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• Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination.

  Alan Watts

  Unity, Hallucinations, Serious

  Alan W. Watts, Daniel Pinchbeck (2013). “The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness”, p.112, New World Library

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• I never understood alienation. Alienation from what? You have to want to be part of something in order to feel alienated from it.

  Boyd Rice

  Crazy, Order, Mad

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• Whether I get on in the world is a question; but I certainly don't get on very well with the world.

  D. H. Lawrence

  Friendship, Success, World

  D.H. Lawrence (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)”, p.9424, Delphi Classics

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• Practically everyone now bemoans Western man's sense of alienation, lack of community, and inability to find ways of organizing society for human ends. We have reached the end of the road that is built on the set of traits held out for male identity-advance at any cost, pay any price, drive out all competitors, and kill them if necessary.

  Jean Baker Miller

  Men, Community, Identity

  Jean Baker Miller (2012). “Toward a New Psychology of Women”, p.88, Beacon Press

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• There is a terrible alienation in the ordinary man between what he is being told and what he secretly believes.

  John le Carre

  Believe, Men, Ordinary

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• Another cause for the increase in alienation and cynicism is a feeling that too many policy decisions that affect individuals have been taken out of any system that has accountability or that they can influence.

  Robert Teeter

  Taken, Decision, Accountability

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• The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one's mind, is the condition of the normal man.

  R. D. Laing

  Men, Mind, Normal

  R.D Laing (1967). “The Politics of Experience”

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• A lone walker is both present and detached, more than an audience but less than a participant. Walking assuages or legitimizes this alienation.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Walkers, Lone, Audience

  Rebecca Solnit (2014). “Wanderlust: A History of Walking”, p.36, Granta Books

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• Large, centralized organizations foster alienation like stagnant ponds breed algae.

  Ricardo Semler

  Organization, Ponds, Algae

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• The most dangerous aspect of present-day life is the dissolution of the feeling of individual responsibility. Mass solitude has done away with any difference between the internal and the external, between the intellectual and the physical.

  Eugenio Montale

  Responsibility, Differences, Solitude

  Eugenio Montale (1976). “Poet in our time”, Calder Publications

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• I don't want to express alienation. It isn't what I feel. I'm interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says be serious, be passionate, wake up.

  Susan Sontag

  Wake Up, Passionate, Engagement

  "Susan Sontag Finds Romance". Interview with Leslie Garis, www.nytimes.com. August 2, 1992.

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• If there's a silver bullet in the battle to recapture Albany, it is the re-engagement of our citizens. This capital has become a physical metaphor for the isolation and alienation of our people.

  Andrew Cuomo

  People, Battle, Citizens

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• Children read books, not reviews. They don't give a hoot about critics.

  Isaac Bashevis Singer

  Children, Book, Writing

  Isaac Bashevis Singer (1971). “A Certain Bridge: Isaac Bashevis Singer on Literature and Life”

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• 'The Simpsons' is about alienation and the ambivalence of living with a family who you love but who drive you completely crazy.

  Matt Groening

  Crazy, Ambivalence

  "Matt Groening, Grabbing for Laughs in the Darkness". "Morning Edition" with Steve Inskeep, www.npr.org. July 26, 2007.

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• Holidays are in no sense an alternative to the congestion and bustle of the cities and work. Quite the contrary. People look to escape into an intensification of the conditions of ordinary life, into a deliberate aggravation of those conditions: further from nature, nearer to artifice, to abstraction, to total pollution, to well above average levels of stress, pressure, concentration and monotony - this is the ideal of popular entertainment. No one is interested in overcoming alienation; the point is to plunge into it to the point of ecstasy. That is what holidays are for.

  Jean Baudrillard

  Stress, Holiday, Vacation

  "Cool Memories".

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• That anyone should need to write a book advising people to "eat food" could be taken as a measure of our alienation and confusion. Or we can choose to see it in a more positive light and count ourselves fortunate indeed that there is once again real food for us to eat.

  Michael Pollan

  Real, Taken, Book

  Michael Pollan (2008). “In Defence of Food: The Myth of Nutrition and the Pleasures of Eating”, p.1950, Penguin UK

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