To love somebody is not just a strong feeling - it is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise.

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.

Happiness today, I think, is for most people the satisfaction of the eternal suckling: to drink in more this, that, or the other.

Both dreams and myths are important communications from ourselves to ourselves. If we do not understand the language in which they are written, we miss a great deal of what we know and tell ourselves in those hours when we are not busy manipulating the outside world.

The lust for power is not rooted in strength but in weakness.

Every society by its own practice of living and by the mode of relatedness, of feelings, and perceiving, develops a system of categories which determines the forms of awareness.

Knowing means to penetrate through the surface, in order to arrive at the roots, and hence the causes; knowing means to "see" reality in its nakedness. Knowing does not mean to be in the possession of the truth; it means to penetrate the surface and to strive critically and actively in order to approach truth ever more closely.