A man who says that men are machines may be a great scientist. A man who says he is a machine is 'depersonalized' in psychiatric jargon.

We have to realize that we are as deeply afraid to live and to love as we are to die.

True sanity entails in one way or another the dissolution of the normal ego, that false self competently adjusted to our alienated social reality... and through this death a rebirth and the eventual re-establishment of a new kind of ego-functioning, the ego now being the servant of the divine, no longer its betrayer.

Children are not yet fools, but we shall turn them into imbeciles like ourselves, with high I.Q.'s if possible.

There is a great deal of pain in life and perhaps the only pain that can be avoided is the pain that comes from trying to avoid pain.

Even facts become fictions without adequate ways of seeing "the facts". We do not need theories so much as the experience that is the source of the theory. We are not satisfied with faith, in the sense of an implausible hypothesis irrationally held: we demand to experience the "evidence".

What do you do when you don't know what to do? No wonder there are more suicides among psychiatrists than in any other profession.