Quotes About Alienation

Con la massa degli oggetti cresce ... il regno degli enti estranei a cui l'uomo è soggiogato. E' lo stadio supremo di un'espansione che ha ritorto il bisogno contro la vita. Il bisogno di denaro è quindi l'unico bisogno prodotto dall'economia politica, e il solo che esso produca.

The spectacle does not realize philosophy, it philosophizes reality, reducing everyone's concrete life to a universe of speculation.

Though separated from what they produce, people nevertheless produce every detail of their world with ever-increasing power. They thus also find themselves increasingly separated from that world. The closer their life comes to being their own creation, the more they are excluded from that life.

The spectacle thus unites what is separate, but it unites it only in its separateness.

Imprisoned in a flattened universe bounded by the screen of the spectacle that has enthralled him, the spectator knows no one but the fictitious speakers who subject him to a one-way monologue about their commodities and the politics of their commodities. The spectacle as a whole serves as his looking glass. What he sees there are dramatizations of illusory escapes from a universal autism.

The worker does not produce himself; he produces an independent power. The success of this production, its abundance, returns to the producer as an abundance of dispossession. All the time and space of his world become foreign to him with the accumulation of his alienated products. The spectacle is the map of this new world, a map which exactly covers its territory. The very powers which escaped us show themselves to us in all their force.

The more he identifies with the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own life and his own desires. The spectacle's estrangement from the acting subject is expressed by the fact that the individual's gestures are no longer his own.

The reigning economic system is a vicious circle of isolation.

With the generalized separation of the worker and his products, every unitary view of accomplished activity and all direct personal communication among producers are lost.

the working class is also occluded from representing itself in the throng of images that make up the society of the spectacle.

Within spectacular society today there is a 'holy trinity' of such roles: consumer, manager and shareholder.

All parties accept that companies must act in the 'interest of their stockholders' whatever the cost in alienation or exploitation.

Sometimes I feel entirely disassociated from what I do. It's a malady of the modern age.

For although nepenthe has calmed me, I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men. This I have known ever since I stretched out my fingers to the abomination within that great gilded frame; stretched out my fingers and touched a cold and unyielding surface of polished glass.

It might, too, have been the singular cold that alienated me; for such chilliness was abnormal on so hot a day, and the abnormal always excites aversion, distrust, and fear.

Many would have disliked to live, if possessed of the peculiar features of Arthur Jermyn, but he had been a poet and a scholar and had not minded.

It is better to laugh at man from outside the universe, than to weep for him within.

I know that light is not for me, save that of the moon over the rock tombs of Neb, nor any gaiety save the unnamed feasts of Nitokris beneath the Great Pyramid; yet in my new wildness and freedom I almost welcome the bitterness of alienage.

he never spoke save in the debased patois of his environment;

Sie verachteten die Welt, als hätten sie Zugang zu anderen und vorzüglicheren Daseinssphären.

despising the world as if they had access to other and preferable spheres of entity.

The Whisperer in Darkness

1. Destruction of the unity among the Western countries, thereby isolating the United States. 2. Alienating the Western peoples from their governments so that the efforts of the Western countries to strengthen themselves will be undermined.

Under the most diverse conditions and disparate circumstances, we watch the development of the same phenomena—homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth.