Best 164 quotes in «alienation quotes» category

Modern capitalism, organising the reduction of all social life to a spectacle, cannot offer any spectacle other than that of our own alienation.

I think it's much more radical to see and show things as they look instead of making them somehow subversive through alienation.

I would like to devote myself to the cause of parental alienation.

One single gift acknowledged in gratefulness has the power to dissolve the ties of our alienation.

Not knowing where your food comes from is a primary form of alienation.

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

There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society: to retreat ahead of it.

Peace dies when the framework is ripped apart. When there is no longer a place that is yours in the world. When you know no longer where your friend is to be found.

Suffered from alienation,carried the weight on my own,had to be so strong,so I believed,and now I know I've succeeded,in finding the place I conceived.

The alienation of man thus appeared as the fundamental evil of capitalist society.

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

There is no alienation that a little power will not cure.

All this sea of humanity reassured me that as alien as i felt, there were always others in the world far odder than I

A common media trope imagines connectivity devices functioning as mere “alienating screens.” In fact, especially in protests, they act as “inte- grating screens” because many people use their devices to connect with other people, not hide from them.

After reading Burgum, [Patricia Highsmith] wrote in her cahier that, like Kafka, she felt she was a pessimist, unable to formulate a system in which an individual could believe in God, government or self. Again like Kafka, she looked into the great abyss which separated the spiritual and the material and saw the terrifying emptiness, the hollowness, at the heart of every man, a sense of alienation she felt compelled to explore in her fiction. As her next hero, she would take an architect, 'a young man whose authority is art and therefore himself,' who when he murders, 'feels no guilt or even fear when he thinks of legal retribution'. The more she read of Kafka the more she felt afraid as she came to realise, 'I am so similar to him.

The ultimate and most important revolutionary aspiration: to see human beings liberated from their alienation

What's important to me is that there's a necessary alienation between me and the subject. I don't want to know them well. I don't want to have any intimate contact with them.

Although the surface of our planet is two-thirds water, we call it the Earth. We say we are earthlings, not waterlings. Our blood is closer to seawater than our bones to soil, but that's no matter. The sea is the cradle we all rocked out of, but it's to dust that we go. From the time that water invented us, we began to seek out dirt. The further we separate ourselves from the dirt, the further we separate ourselves from ourselves. Alienation is a disease of the unsoiled.

And do I ask, wherefore my heart Falters, oppressed with unknown needs? Why some inexplicable smart All movement of my life impedes? Alas! in living Nature’s stead, Where God His human creature set, In smoke and mould the fleshless dead And bones of beasts surround me yet!

And the strangest thing about the nightmare street was that none of the millions of things for sale were made there. They were only sold there. Where were the workshops, the factories, where were the farmers, the craftsmen, the miners, the weavers, the chemists, the carvers, the dyers, the designers, the machinists, where were the hands, the people who made? Out of sight, somewhere else. Behind walls. All the people in all the shops were either buyers or sellers. They had no relation to the things but that of possession.

As soon as I decided I'd have to dig down still deeper to uncover the root of my listless withdrawal from life, I became aware of some interference from the past distracting and confusing my thoughts, causing me a sensation that was at the same time oppressive, expectant and empty. In these somewhat contradictory feelings, I came to recognize my childish sense of having run down like a clock that needed someone to wind it before it could go again; and saw that I was now no less helpless than in those far-off days when I waited for somebody to take me by the hand and tell me what to do. On my own initiative I could do nothing, take no responsibility, make no decisions only watch my existence unroll.

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent--which attitude certainly has a great deal to support it. On the other hand, it is only because the world looks on his talent with such frightening indifference that the artist is compelled to make his talent important.

As I usually do when I want to get rid of someone whose conversation bores me, I pretended to agree.

At the micro-sociological level, most humans are doing better than ever. Yet there is so much confusion, suffering and bitter resentment. How many beautiful, privileged people have I not heard whisper to me, late at night, that if it were up to them, they would never have been born; that they are angry with the world; that they were let down; that they live with guilt and self-doubt; that their friends and families are hypocrites? These are signs of the alienation suffered by modern human beings.

At the top of the slope on the perimeter of the site, overlooking six lanes of motorway, is a diner frequented by lorry drivers who have either just unloaded or or are waiting to pick up their cargo. Anyone nursing a disappointment with domestic life would find relief in this tiled, brightly lit cafeteria with its smells of fries and petrol, for it has the reassuring feel of a place where everyone is just passing through--and which therefore has none of the close-knit or convivial atmosphere which could cast a humiliating light on one's own alienation. It suggests itself as an ideal location for Christmas lunch for those let down by their families.

Barack wasn't a real black man, like them--someone who spoke like that, looked like that, and read that many books could never be. What bothered me most was that Barack exemplified everything parents on the South Side often said they wanted for their kids.

Big fucking mistake man. You can't be near her. Don't you get it? [...] She's part of this city. Do you see? I mean, really part of it. You hurt her, you - hurt all of this.

But vilifying those we love always alienates us from them to a certain extent. Idols should not be touched: the gilding comes off on the hands.

Capital is dead labour, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.

Capitalism does not merely oppress workers on the factory floor. It creates an entire culture in which the logic of oppression and competition become common sense. It turns people against each other and their mvn humanity. Like Franz Kafka's character in The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa, people are alienated from their human selves, isolated from their fellmv beings, and tortured by the loss of all that could be possible.

Day by day, month by month, doubt by doubt, law and order became fascism; education, constraint; work, alienation; revolution, mere sport; leisure, a privilege of class; marijuana, a harmless weed; family, a stifling hothouse; affluence, oppression; success, a social disease; sex, an innocent pastime; youth, a permanent tribunal; maturity, the new senility; discipline, an attack on personality; Christianity... and the West... and white skin...

DID patients often feel very isolated/lonely, in the sense that they believe they are the only one in the universe who is “different” from others and that they do not understand themselves... DePrince et al found that alienation was the only cognitive appraisal variable to differentiate DID from PTSD. While the groups had similar appraisals of shame, betrayal, self-blame, anger, and fear, the DID participants had higher appraisal of themselves as experiencing alienation. This construct is associated with feeling alone, disconnected, and different.

Die Entfremdung erscheint sowohl darin, daß mein Lebensmittel eines andern ist, daß das, was mein Wunsch, der unzugängliche Besitz eines andern ist, als daß jede Sache selbst ein andres als sie selbst, als daß meine Tätigkeit ein andres, als endlich – und das gilt auch für den Kapitalisten – daß überhaupt die unmenschliche Macht her[rscht].

Do not say I use what is mine: you use what is alien to you; the indulgent, selfish use makes what is yours something alien; that is why I call it alien good, because you use it with a hardened heart and claim that it is right, that you alone live from what is yours.

Everyone else not real-very distant, small figures. I would have to swim a thousand miles to reach the margin of the relationship, on the other side of which might lie other people, and it was too far, I was too tired. The almost infinitely extending network of that relationship; its dense weave That's what held me-

Everyone who lived in high-up, magical places must feel the same way. You come down into the world and you mingle, but all the while there's something calling you back.

Franklin probeerde na te denken. Hij voelde dat de mevrouw haar arm om hem heen sloeg en hem even tegen zich aan drukte. Hetgeen hem zeer achterdochtig maakte, maar hij zei er niets van.

Carl Schmitt could boast with some justice that the Nazi revolution was orderly and disciplined. But the reason lies not so much within the Nazis themselves as in the lack of an effective opposition. For millions the Nazi ideology did assuage their anxiety, did end their alienation, and did give hope for a better future. Other millions watched passively, not deeply committed to resistance. "Let them have a chance" was a typical attitude. Hitler took the chance and made the most of it.

Capitalists too, as the novelist Charles Dickens noted, liked to think of their workers as 'hands' only, preferring to forget they had stomachs and brains. But, said the more perceptive nineteenth-century critics, if this is how people live their lives at work, then how on earth can they think differently when they come home at night? How might it be possible to build a sense of moral community or of social solidarity, of collective and meaningful ways of belonging and living that are untainted by the brutality, ignorance and stupidity that envelops labourers at work? How, above all, are workers supposed to develop any sense of their mastery over their own fates and fortunes when they depend so deeply upon a multitude of distant, unknown and in many respects unknowable people who put breakfast on their table every day?

Everywhere he went he saw this same phenomenon—parents unmindful of their children, their attention fixed on little glass windows in the palms of their hands, mesmerized like drug addicts, longing for some artificial connection while their own flesh and blood careened wildly through a chaotic and violent world behind their backs. The writer was even worse. He invented false worlds and peopled them with ghosts while his motherless son scanned the horizon for a human connection. It was shameful. What did a man need to lose to be shaken from his immersion in a dream? What terminal force could liberate him from the pursuit of phantoms and engage him in the living world around him?

Fear is a subject that I have become increasingly aware of—the result of a period that I call post-divorce. Admittedly aware of the general concerns about “falling” too, I am more concerned about the burdens of a non-custodial—the dilemma of parental alienation with absolute liability for financial support. If any 'positive' aspect could be extracted from the non-custodial lifestyle, it is the accelerated-track toward financial distress and familial disparity. What may have occurred in the 1930s in a mass economic-downward spiral of society has similarity to the consequences of the divorce—as I see it.

I am isolated. I sit in a glass ball, I see people through a glass wall. I scream, but they do not hear me. - Ellen West

For a moment of nearly five seconds Nemed had wanted to correct, to interject with the boasting recitation of a child who has just learned something interesting about the subject at hand and wants to amaze the adults; he had wanted to tell Emer that the Inrisus were not magical or truly evil, and that their medicine was amazing. The tablet suggested that the Inrisus were entirely made of tumor cells; long ago, blue historians believed, the Inrisus had conquered cancer and found a way to separate its resilience to radiation and chemical attack from its malignancy, producing cells both immortal and functional. Their brains and hearts and other parts would keep showing up on medical scans, like blotches in a smoker’s lungs. Carcinogens simply made an Inrisus pregnant. But then Nemed realized that Emer was wearing beaver hide, that no part of his costume even had a zipper; he might not even know what cancer was. He wouldn’t know that it could be treated with radiation or chemicals; he wouldn’t appreciate the Inrisus and their ability to turn cancer into eternal life. He would probably call it necromancy, or a form of vampirism, stealing the life of an unborn infant because that was supposed to be the only way to live forever in the old stories of the Folk. I think less of him, Nemed realized. Him, and the others.

Hegel represents history as the self-realization of spirit (Geist) or God. The fundamental scheme of his theory is as follows. Spirit is self-creative energy imbued with a drive to become fully conscious of itself as spirit. Nature is spirit in its self-objectification in space; history is spirit in its self-objectification as culture—the succession of world-dominant civilizations from the ancient Orient to modern Europe. Spirit actualizes its nature as self-conscious being by the process of knowing. Through the mind of man, philosophical man in particular, the world achieves consciousness of itself as spirit. This process involves the repeated overcoming of spirit's alienation (Entfremdung) from itself, which takes place when spirit as the knowing mind confronts a world that appears, albeit falsely, as objective, i.e. as other than spirit. Knowing is recognition, whereby spirit destroys the illusory otherness of the objective world and recognizes it as actually subjective or selbstisch. The process terminates at the stage of "absolute knowledge," when spirit is finally and fully "at home with itself in its otherness," having recognized the whole of creation as spirit—Hegelianism itself being the scientific form of this ultimate self-knowledge on spirit's part.

He was a stranger here. The people who might remember him would certainly not welcome him. His old gang had cast him out, along with all of the former friends and parents. The suburban landscape of hypocrisy, so hated in his youth, beheld again and with it, old feelings that motivated him through life more than he would ever admit. Every turning point in life, already decided by all the events here

I answered that, of recent years, I’d rather lost the habit of noting my feelings, and hardly knew what to answer. I could truthfully say I’d been quite fond of Mother— but really that didn’t mean much. All normal people, I added as on afterthought, had more or less desired the death of those they loved, at some time or another.

I don't think I can marry, I'm not fit for it, I'm not real enough. That's the trouble. I'm a puppet that's realised what's wrong with itself and it's horrible. I'm propped up somewhere all alone, watching the real people go past. I'm propped up crying in a corner.

I feel myself alien from everyone; that is my kind of Jewishness.

I felt like a toilet frog during the last three decades of the preceding century. (38)

I felt that the metal of my spirit, like a bar of iron that is softened and bent by a persistent flame, was being gradually softened and bent by the troubles that oppressed it. In spite of myself, I was conscious of a feeling of envy for those who did not suffer from such troubles, for the wealthy and the privileged; and this envy, I observed, was accompanied—still against my will—by a feeling of bitterness towards them, which, in turn, did not limit its aim to particular persons or situations, but, as if by an uncontrollable bias, tended to assume the general, abstract character of a whole conception of life. In fact, during those difficult days, I came very gradually to feel that my irritation and my intolerance of poverty were turning into a revolt against injustice, and not only against the injustice which struck at me personally but the injustice from which so many others like me suffered. I was quite aware of this almost imperceptible transformation of my subjective resentments into objective reflections and states of mind, owing to the bent of my thoughts which led always and irresistibly in the same direction: owing also to my conversation, which, without my intending it, alway harped upon the same subject. I also noticed in myself a growing sympathy for those political parties which proclaimed their struggle against the evils and infamies of the society to which, in the end I had attributed the troubles that beset me—a society which, as I thought, in reference to myself, allowed its best sons to languish and protected its worst ones. Usually, and in the simpler, less cultivated people, this process occurs without their knowing it, in the dark depths of consciousness where, by a kind of mysterious alchemy, egoism is transmuted into altruism, hatred into love, fear into courage; but to me, accustomed as I was to observing and studying myself, the whole thing was clear and visible, as though I were watching it happen in someone else; and yet I was aware the whole time that I was being swayed by material subjective factors, that I was transforming purely personal motives into universal reasons.