The existing liberties and the existing gratifications are tied to the requirements of repression: they themselves become instruments of repression.

The so-called consumer society and the politics of corporate capitalism have created a second nature of man which ties him libidinally and aggressively to the commodity form. The need for possessing, consuming, handling and constantly renewing the gadgets, devices, instruments, engines, offered to and imposed upon the people, for using these wares even at the danger of one’s own destruction, has become a “biological” need.

Preaching nonviolence on principle reproduces the existing institutionalized violence.

One can delineate the domain of philosophy however one likes, but in its search for truth, philosophy is always concerned with human existence. Authentic philosophizing refuses to remain at the stage of knowledge […]. Care for human existence and its truth makes philosophy a 'practical science' in the deepest sense, and it also leads philosophy—and this is the crucial point—into the concrete distress of human existence.

The range of choice open to the individual is not the decisive factor in determining the degree of human freedom, but what can be chosen and what is chosen by the individual.

Contemporary industrial society is now characterised more than ever by "the need for stupefying work where it is no longer a real necessity."

The sickness of the individual is ultimately caused by and sustained by the sickness of his civilization