If everyone lives roughly the same lies about the same thing, there is no one to call them liars. They jointly establish their own sanity and themselves normal.

...Erich Fromm wondered why most people did not become insane in the face of the existential contradiction between a symbolic self, that seems to give man infinite worth in a timeless scheme of things, and a body that is worth about 98¢.

The road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse and often detours or ends there.

All power is in essence power to deny mortality.

Guilt results from unused life, from the unlived in us.

Modern man is drinking and drugging himself out of awareness, or he spends his time shopping, which is the same thing.

In seeking to avoid evil, humanity is responsible for bringing more evil into the world than organisms could ever do merely by exercising their digestive tracts. It is our ingenuity, rather than our animal nature, that has given our fellow creatures such a bitter earthly fate.