What is it that distinguishes man from animals? It is not his upright posture. That was present in the apes long before the brain ...began to develop. Nor is it the use of tools. It is something altogether new, a previously unknown quality: self-awareness. Animals, too, have awareness. They are aware of objects; they know this is one thing and that another. But when the human being as such was born he had a new and different consciousness, a consciousness of himself; he knew that he existed and that he was something different, something apart from nature, apart from other people, too. He experienced himself. He was aware that he thought and felt. As far as we know, there is nothing analogous to this anywhere in the animal kingdom. That is the specific quality that makes human beings human.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Modern man, if he dared to be articulate about his concept of heaven, would describe a vision which would look like the biggest de...partment store in the world, showing new things and gadgets, and himself having plenty of money with which to buy them. He would wander around open-mouthed in this heaven of gadgets and commodities, provided only that there were ever more and newer things to buy, and perhaps that his neighbors were just a little less privileged than he.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Love is often nothing but a favorable exchange between two people who get the most of what they can expect, considering their valu...e on the personality market.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
By alienation is meant a mode of experience in which the person experiences himself as an alien. He has become, one might say, est...ranged from himself. He does not experience himself as the center of his world, as the creator of his own acts--but his acts and their consequences have become his masters, whom he obeys, or whom he may even worship. The alienated person is out of touch with himself as he is out of touch with any other person. He, like the others, are experienced as things are experienced; with the senses and with common sense, but at the same time without being related to oneself and to the world outside positively.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The kind of relatedness to the world may be noble or trivial, but even being related to the basest kind of pattern is immensely pr...eferable to being alone.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »