Each one of us, as long as life stirs is us, may play a part in extricating ourselves from the power system by asserting our primacy as people in quiet acts of mental or physical withdrawal-in gestures of non-conformity, in abstentions, restrictions, inhibitions, which will liberate us from the domination of the pentagon of power.

A society that gives to one class all the opportunities for leisure, and to another all the burdens of work, dooms both classes to spiritual sterility.

Growth and self-transformation cannot be delegated.

The philosophers of industrialism, from Bacon to Bentham, from Smith to Marx, insisted that the improvement of man's condition was the highest requirement of morality. But in what did the improvement consist? The answer seemed so obvious to them that they did not bother to justify it: the expansion and fulfillment of the material wants of man, and the spread of these benefits, from the few who had once preempted them, to the many who had so long lived on the scraps Dives had thrown into the gutter.

The self holds both a hell and a heaven.

He who touches the soil of Manhattan and the pavement of New York, touches, whenever he knows or not, Walt Whitman.

By his very success in inventing labor-saving devices, modern man has manufactured an abyss of boredom that only the privileged classes in earlier civilizations have ever fathomed.