Human Alienation Quotes

Lacking positive myths to guide him, many a sensitive contemporary man finds only the model of the machine beckoning him from every side to make himself over into its image.

We have witnessed the terrible increases in the incidence of alcoholism, the advent of drug dependency, the protests, marches, strikes and human alienation.

The marriage of Capital with Science was responsible for the great leap forward into what we live in today. Pure scientists discovered the components into which the natural environment could be decomposed; investors placed their bets on the various methods of decomposition; applied scientists or managers saw to it that the wage workers in their charge carried the project through. Social scientists sought ways to make the workers less human, more efficient and machine-like. Thanks to science, capitalists were able to transform much of the natural environment into a processed world, an artifice, and to reduce most human beings into efficient tenders of the artifice.

I think we suffer from certain alienation. We live on this planet, but we somehow have an idea that we're elevated from it, that we're not nature. We're a creature that manages nature and is superior and does whatever it wants. That creates a separation between humanity and the rest of the planet.

I've learned that being a superhero isn't all glitz and glamour. We think if we have a special power, our problem will go away. It's just a new set of problems. Being a superhero alienates you and separates you from humanity. As Spiderman famously said, 'With great power comes great responsibility.'

Only man has become an outsider - and because of his own efforts. On his own, he has separated himself from existence.

In the Germany of the l920s, the Weimar Republic, both orga­nismic biology and Gestalt psychology were part of a larger intellectual trend that saw itself as a protest movement against the increasing fragmentation and alienation of human nature. The entire Weimar culture was characterized by an antimechanistic outlook, a "hunger for wholeness". Organismic biology, Gestalt psychology, ecology, and, later on, general systems theory all grew out of this holistic zeitgeist.

What I ask of [the writer] is not to ignore the reality and the fundamental problems that exist. The world's hunger, the atomic threat, the alienation of man, I am astonished that they do not color all our literature.

I am secretly afraid of animals.... I think it is because of the usness in their eyes, with the underlying not-usness which beliesit, and is so tragic a reminder of the lost age when we human beings branched off and left them: left them to eternal inarticulateness and slavery. Why? their eyes seem to ask us.

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.