Optimism is an alienated form of faith, pessimism an alienated form of despair.

We live in a world of things, and our only connection with them is that we know how to manipulate or to consume them.

In his condemnation [Karl] Marx referred to institutionalized religion,that has precisely the function of anesthetizing men till they do not notice the in- justice of which they are the perpetrators and the victims.

The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.

Society, and the family as its psycho social agent, has to solve a difficult problem: How to break a person's will without his being aware of it? Yet by a complicated process of indoctrination, rewards, punishments, and fitting ideology, it solves this task by and large so well that most people believe they are following their own will and are unaware that their will itself is conditioned and manipulated.

Just as love is an orientation which refers to all objects and is incompatible with the restriction to one object, so is reason a human faculty which must embrace the whole of the world with which man is confronted.

There is only one meaning of life: the act of living itself.