If you do not smile, you are judged lacking in a ‘pleasing personality’ – and you need to have a pleasing personality if you want to sell your services, whether as a waitress, a salesman, or a physician.
In the 19th century inhumanity meant cruelty; in the 20th century it means schizoid self-alienation.
On the whole, our modern ritual is impoverished and does not fulfill man’s need for collective art and ritual.
The member of a primitive clan might express his identity in the formula “I am we”; he cannot yet conceive of himself as an “individual,” existing apart from his group.
It is time to cease to argue about God, and instead to unite in the unmasking of contemporary forms of idolatry.
We are not on the way to greater individualism, but are becoming an increasingly manipulated mass civilization.
People seek a new orientation, a new philosophy, one which is centered on the priorities of life-physically and spiritually-and not on the priorities of death.
Erotic love begins with separateness, and ends in oneness. Motherly love begins with oneness, and leads to separateness.
In the first World War British propaganda had to invent the stories of German soldiers bayoneting Belgian babies, because there were too few real atrocities to feed the hatred against the enemy.
The criterion of mental health is not one of individual adjustment to a given social order, but a universal one, valid for all men, of giving a satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.
Society must be organized in such a way that mans social, loving nature is not separated from his social existence, but becomes one with it.
Fairness means not to use fraud and trickery in the exchange of commodities and services and the exchange of feelings.
The essential difference between the unhappy, neurotic type person and him of great joy is the difference between get and give.
Every society by its own practice of living and by the mode of relatedness, of feelings, and perceiving, develops a system of categories which determines the forms of awareness.
Chronic boredom compensated or uncompensated constitutes one of the major psychopathological phenomena in contemporary technotronic society, although it is only recently that it has found some recognition.
I believe indeed that to rescue the humanist tradition of the last decades is of the utmost importance, and that Victor Serge is one of the outstanding personalities representing the socialist aspect of humanism.
The revolutionary and critical thinker is in a certain way always outside of his society while of course he is at the same time also in it.
The need for the creation of collective art and ritual on a nonclerical basis is at least as important as literacy and higher education.
Man can never stand still. He must find solutions to this contradiction, and ever better solutions to the extent to which reality enables him.
The existential split in man would be unbearable could he not establish a sense of unity within himself and with the natural and human world outside.