Exploitation and manipulation produce boredom and triviality; they cripple man, and all factors that make man into a psychic cripple turn him also into a sadist or a destroyer.

The aim of life is to be fully born, though its tragedy is that most of us die before we are thus born.

The fact is that the culture does not have only positive effects on our intellectual and moral functions but also negative effects.

The task we must set for ourselves is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity.

There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started out with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet which fails so regularly, as love.

The spirit of a production-centered, commodity-greedy society is such that only the non-conformist can defend himself sufficiently against it. Those who are seriously concerned with love as the only rational answer to the problem of human existence must, then, arrive at the conclusion that important and radical changes in our social structure are necessary, if love is to become a social and not a highly individualistic, marginal phenomenon.

In the 19th century inhumanity meant cruelty; in the 20th century it means schizoid self-alienation.