Of course, a culture as manically and massively materialistic as ours creates materialistic behavior in its people, especially in those people who've been subjected to nothing but the destruction of imagination that this culture calls education, the destruction of autonomy it calls work, and the destruction of activity it calls entertainment.

The word power has such a generally negative implication in our society. What are people talking about? Are they talking about muscles, or control?

I think we're miserable partly because we have only one god, and that's economics.

In the past, friendship was a huge thing. But it's hard for us to think of friendship as a calling, because it's not a vocation.

As the popular trust in science fades - and many sociologists say that's happening today - people will develop a distrust of purely "scientific" psychology. Researchers in the universities haven't picked up on this; they're more interested in genetics and computer models of thinking than ever. But, in general, there is a huge distrust of the scientific establishment now.

The moment the angel enters a life it enters an environment. We are ecological from day one.

People used to trust their doctor. They went to an expert. Now people have new ideas and are thinking for themselves. That's a very important change in our collective psychology.