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

If we begin to say, "Well, maybe we can cope better with the Russians if we also transform ourselves into a managed society, if we, as somebody put it the other day, train our soldiers to be like the Turks, who have fought so bravely in Korea, if we are willing to change our whole way of life for the sake of so-called "survival," then I think we do exactly that which threatens our survival.

Finally one arrives at this: the state of sleep has an ambiguous function; in sleep, the lack of contact with the culture brings out the worst and also the best in us.

The pleasure in complete domination over another person (or other animate creature) is the very essence of the sadistic drive. Another way of formulating the same thought is to say that the aim of sadism is to transform man into a thing, something animate into something inanimate, since by complete and absolute control the living loses one essential quality of life - freedom.

Many students of dreams, from Plato to [Sigmund] Freud, hold that the sleeping person,deprived of contact with the outside world, regresses temporarily to an irrational primitive mental state.

Sanity is only that which is within the frame of reference of conventional thought.

As we ascend the social ladder, viciousness wears a thicker mask.