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.
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.
The destruction of the world is the last, almost desperate attempt to save myself from being crushed by it.
Man is born as a freak of nature, being within nature and yet transcending it. He has to find principles of action and decision-making which replace the principles of instincts.
Sleep is often the only occasion in which man cannot silence his conscience; we forget what we knew in our dream.
In the development of both capitalism and communism, as we visualize them in the next fifty or a hundred years, the processes that encourage human alienation will continue.
The person who gives up his individual self and becomes an automaton, identical with millions of other automatons around him, need not feel alone and anxious any more. But the price he pays, however, is high; it is the loss of his self.
Love is the productive form of relatedness to others and to oneself. It implies responsibility, care, respect. If it isn’t productive and respectful, it isn’t love, but only fear masquerading as love.
Boredom is nothing but the experience of a paralysis of our productive powers and the sense of unaliveness. Among the evils of life, there are few which are as painful as boredom, and consequently every attempt is made to avoid it.
I love in you everybody, I love through you the world, I love in you also myself.
Both dreams and myths are important communications from ourselves to ourselves.