[Sigmund Freud] makes the interpretation of dreams extremely simple: it deals in substance with discovering what unconscious desires, distorted but recognizable, are hid-den in the dream. Instead, for me the dream is a mixture of thoughts and sensations that man has when he is asleep, a mental state relatively protected from the constant noise that society makes.

What is common to our societies is the development into a managed mass society, with big bureaucracy, managing people. The Russians do it by force. We do it by persuasion.

Can freedom become a burden, too heavy for man to bear, something he tries to escape from?..Is there not also, perhaps, besides an innate desire for freedom, an instinctive wish for submission?

We are a society of notoriously unhappy people: lonely, anxious, depressed, destructive, dependent - people who are glad when we have killed the time we are trying so hard to save.

We try to evade the question of existence with property, prestige, power, possession, production, fun, and, ultimately, by trying to forget that we- that I- exist. No matter how much he thinks of God or goes to church, or how much he believes in religious ideas , if he, the whole man, is deaf to the question of existence, if he does not have an answer to it, he is marking time, and he lives and dies like one of the million things he produces. He thinks of God, instead of experiencing God.

There is nothing of which we are more ashamed than of not being ourselves. And there is nothing which brings us greater joy and happiness than to think, feel, and say what is ours.

Our whole culture is based on the appetite for buying, on the idea of a mutually favorable exchange. .... For the man an attractive girl - and for the woman an attractive man - are the prizes they are after. 'attractive' usually means a nice package of qualities which are popular and sought after on the personality market. What specifically makes a person attractive depends on the fashion of the time, physically as well as mentally. ... Two persons thus fall in love when they feel they have found the best object available on the market, considering the limitations of their own exchange values.