Even the loveliest dream bears like a blemish its difference from reality, the awareness that what it grants is mere illusion.

So the experience of death is turned into that of the exchange of functionaries, and anything in the natural relationship to death that is not wholly absorbed into the social one is turned over to hygiene. In being seen as no more than the exit of a living creature from the social combine, death has been domesticated: dying merely confirms the absolute irrelevance of the natural organism in face of the social absolute.

Life has changed into a timeless succession of shocks, interspaced with empty, paralysed intervals.

People have so manipulated the concept of freedom that it finally boils down to the right of the stronger and richer to take from the weaker and poorer whatever they still have.

Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.

The very people who burst with proofs of exuberant vitality could easily be taken for prepared corpses, from whom the news of their not-quite-successful decease has been withheld for reasons of population policy. Underlying the prevalent health is death. All the movements of health resemble the reflex-movements of beings whose hearts have stopped beating.

He who stands aloof runs the risk of believing himself better than others and misusing his critique of society as an ideology for his private interest.