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What's important to me is that there's a necessary alienation between me and the subject. I don't want to know them well. I don't want to have any intimate contact with them.
Sep 10, 2025
If God had perceived that our greatest need was economic, he would have sent an economist. If he had perceived that our greatest need was entertainment, he would have sent us a comedian or an artist. If God had perceived that our greatest need was political stability, he would have sent us a politician. If he had perceived that our greatest need was health, he would have sent us a doctor. But he perceived that our greatest need involved our sin, our alienation from him, our profound rebellion, our death; and he sent us a Savior.
When we respect our blood ancestors and our spiritual ancestors, we feel rooted. If we find ways to cherish and develop our spiritual heritage, we will avoid the kind of alienation that is destroying society, and we will become whole again. ... Learning to touch deeply the jewels of our own tradition will allow us to understand and appreciate the values of other traditions, and this will benefit everyone.
Our society is so fragmented, our family lives so sundered by physical and emotional distance, our friendships so sporadic, our intimacies so 'in-between' things and often so utilitarian, that there are few places where we can feel truly safe.
I never understood alienation. Alienation from what? You have to want to be part of something in order to feel alienated from it.
Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination.
Alienation is perhaps the most effective tool of control in America, and every reminder of our real connectedness weakens that tool.
Inability to accept the mystic experience is more than an intellectual handicap.
He was so terrible that he was no longer terrible, only dehumanized.
A hermit is simply a person to whom civilization has failed to adjust itself.
When we suddenly awake to the realization that there is no barrier, and never has been, one realizes that one is all things mountains, rivers, grasses, trees, sun, moon, stars, universe are all oneself. There is no longer a division or barrier between myself and others, no longer any feeling of alienation or fear there is nothing apart from oneself and therefore nothing to fear. Realizing this results in true compassion. Other people and things are not seen as apart from oneself but, on the contrary, as one's own body.
It is really an alienation to believe that learning is the result of teaching.
Human beings are compelled to live within a lie, but they can be compelled to do so only because they are in fact capable of living in this way. Therefore not only does the system alienate humanity, but at the same time alienated humanity supports this system as its own involuntary master plan, as a degenerate image of its own degeneration, as a record of people's own failure as individuals.
We are imprisoned in life in the company of persons powerfully unlike us.
Alienation as our present destiny is achieved only by outrageous violence perpetrated by human beings on human beings.
Marks of Identity is, among other things, the expression of the process of alienation in a contemporary intellectual with respect to his own country.
Young alienation, disappointment and heartache is all a part of the first real growing up that we do.
Without alienation, there can be no politics.
There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society: to retreat ahead of it.
Peace dies when the framework is ripped apart. When there is no longer a place that is yours in the world. When you know no longer where your friend is to be found.
To a man utterly without a sense of belonging, mere life is all that matters. It is the only reality in an eternity of nothingness, and he clings to it with shameless despair.
Behind the masks of total choice, different forms of the same alienation confront each other.
It's such a profound alienation for a person not to be at home in their own body.
Alienation produces eccentrics or revolutionaries.
We think that by protecting ourselves from suffering, we are being kind to ourselves. The truth is we only become more fearful, more hardened and more alienated. We experience ourselves as being separate from the whole. This separateness becomes like a prison for us - a prison that restricts us to our personal hopes and fears, and to caring only for the people nearest to us. Curiously enough, if we primarily try to shield ourselves from discomfort, we suffer. Yet, when we don't close off, when we let our hearts break, we discover our kinship with all beings.
I am too far away from what I love and my distance is without remedy.
Alienation as we find it in modern society is almost total… Man has created a world of man-made things as it never existed before. He has constructed a complicated social machine to administer the technical machine he built. The more powerful and gigantic the forces are which he unleashes, the more powerless he feels himself as a human being. He is owned by his creations, and has lost ownership of himself.
The historical experience of socialist countries has sadly demonstrated that collectivism does not do away with alienation but rather increases it, adding to it a lack of basic necessities and economic inefficiency.
The cost of sanity in this society, is a certain level of alienation
Alienation and loneliness plant the seeds for rebellion and consciousness.
Everything intercepts us from ourselves.
There is no religion in which everyday life is not considered a prison; there is no philosophy or ideology that does not think that we live in alienation.
The alienation of man thus appeared as the fundamental evil of capitalist society.
Loneliness is caused by an alienation from life. It is a loneliness from your real self.
We have to heal our wounded world. The chaos, despair, and senseless destruction we see today are a result of the alienation that people feel from each other and their environment.
The number one problem in our world is alienation, rich versus poor, black versus white, labor versus management, conservative versus liberal, East versus West . . . But Christ came to bring about reconciliation and peace.
Large, centralized organizations foster alienation like stagnant ponds breed algae.
If there's a silver bullet in the battle to recapture Albany, it is the re-engagement of our citizens. This capital has become a physical metaphor for the isolation and alienation of our people.
When we conduct agriculture, we are, therefore, altering the ecological arrangement that was responsible for our genesis as a species. I think that this is the reason that this alienation has allowed us to see and regard land mostly as a resource. So we have created a problem for ourselves from the word "go," for land is not a resource any more than humans are resources.
Populism is about is alienation in large numbers of people, but aggravated and provoked by a deteriorating economic conditions.
We have witnessed the terrible increases in the incidence of alcoholism, the advent of drug dependency, the protests, marches, strikes and human alienation.
It was in reading Tristam Shandy that I noticed how it is primarily men who gravitate towards the game-playing self-reflexive style. There is an alienation from emotion in it, a Nervous Nelly fear of letting go and being "exposed." As an attitude towards life, it betrays a perpetual adolescence. Those who hurled themselves after Derrida were not the most sophisticated but the most pretentious, and least creative members of my generation of academics.
You and I share the same DNA. Is there anything more lonely than that?
Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular. But the realism is merely a mask for depression's actual essence, which is an overwhelming estrangement from humanity. The more persuaded you are of your unique access to the rottenness, the more afraid you become of engaging with the world; and the less you engage with the world, the more perfidiously happy-faced the rest of humanity seems for continuing to engage with it.
The organization controlling the material equipment of our everyday life is such that what in itself would enable us to construct it richly plunges us instead into a poverty of abundance, making alienation all the more intolerable as each convenience promises liberation and turns out to be only one more burden. We are condemned to slavery to the means of liberation.
In the history of humanity there are no civilizations or cultures which fail to manifest, in one or a thousand ways, this need for an absolute that is called heaven, freedom, a miracle, a lost paradise to be regained, peace, the going beyond History... There is no religion in which everyday life is not considered a prison; there is no philosophy or ideology that does not think that we live in alienation.... Humanity has always had a nostalgia for the freedom that is only beauty, that is only real; life, plenitude, light.
It is the same among the men and women, as among the silent trees; always a referred existence, an absence, never a presence and satisfaction. Is it, that beauty can never be grasped? In persons and in landscape is equally inaccessible?
A feminazi is a woman to whom the most important thing in life is seeing to it that as many abortions as possible are performed. Their unspoken reasoning is quite simple. Abortion is the single greatest avenue for militant women to exercise their quest for power and advance their belief that men aren't necessary.
What I wanted to try and figure out was, okay, in contemporary 21st century life the alienation between the self and the land around you or the self and even the urban landscape. You name it.
In the 19th century inhumanity meant cruelty; in the 20th century it means schizoid self-alienation.