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.

Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level.

To live fully is to live with an awareness of the rumble of terror that underlies everything.

All power is in essence power to deny mortality.

We might say that psychoanalysis revealed to us the complex penalties of denying the truth of man's condition, what we might call the costs of pretending not to be mad.

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

...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¢.