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Alienation Quotes

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Alienation Quotes

“It embarrasses me to admit this, but on the first day of school, I sat on a bench, next to one of the new kids. I crossed my fingers, hoping he’d talk to me. Either he didn’t notice me or thought I wasn’t very popular. I’m not. So, maybe the word has gotten out.”

FriendsLonelyAloneShyAlienationBenzehabeZonked
Book:Zonked Out: The Teen Psychologist of San Marcos Who Killed Her Santa Claus and Found the Blue-Black Edge of the Love Universe
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“At moments I wish to became part of the perennially roaring hurricanes of abuses and stand naked dropping all sense of responsibilities, And cry with the quivering speech it has taught by mustering the sanguine spirit made from this city’s water, with impulses supported by its air— This is a city of those who dance to the senseless slogans of the crowd, Of those who see beauty on outer paints used to camouflage real humans, Of those dozing contentedly on insensitivity as their ideals, Of those who live in dreams and die in waking hours, Of those who lose themselves walking, Of the lunatics.”

DesireHumanityFreedomSocietyIllusionMadnessChaosRebellionAlienationDisillusionment
Author:Suman Pokhrel
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“Every kind of passion is being transformed into a form of industry. Every passion is monetized or at least expected to be. This can be observed in schools, shows, articles, conferences, films, advertisements, and even within the primitive instincts of humans: the relentless conversion of passion into profession, the monetization of personal emotions and thoughts. This message is constantly propagated, taught, and encouraged by all of these forces. More than that, it is what people dream of—because they all embody identities scripted by singular capitalist narratives. And this constitutes the greatest insult to one’s inner world.”

SelfPassionInterestIdentityCapitalismMarketingAdvertisingAlienationSaleMonetizing
Author:Sov8840
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“I am not alone. Existing in this melancholic world causes numerous individuals to feel remorseful and even harbor resentment. Contemplating the world fills me with melancholy. I sense a profound disconnection from the world. Feeling completely drained by my internal and external despair and indifference. I find myself filled with regret and eagerly await the conclusion. I believe my overwhelming anxiety has transformed into anhedonia and depression. Feelings of emptiness and not fitting in are common to all people. Feeling like an outsider hinders connection with others. Once quite the extrovert. I have always experienced a deep sense of disconnection, but at this stage of my life, numerous things have gone awry, making it almost unbearable.”

DespairDepressionAlienationSchizophreniaExistential CrisisAkathisiaMid Life CrisisMelancholiaAnhedonia
Author:Jonathan Harnisch
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“The fundamental predicament of homosexuals is one that no amount of legislation can improve. Even the argument that the repeal of the laws against private indecency will lessen opportunities for blackmail is founded on a misunderstanding. No one in his right senses will attempt to blackmail anyone to the police. The realization of the threat would merely lead to both parties being clapped into a dungeon. Blackmail operates by the threat to reveal facts of which a man is ashamed to those whose good opinion he prizes. This is hardly ever likely to be the C.I.D. It may easily be the victim's mother or wife or employer. To rob blackmail of its potency, it would be necessary to remove the homosexual's feeling of shame. This no power on earth can do. From this feeling of inadequacy and exile I was not immune. The only difference between me and other outsiders was that I cried aloud for pardon. Almost every living being seems to feel that if all were known he would be admired and even I was never able to rid myself of the idea that if all were known I would be forgiven.”

HappinessSexSadnessDespairSexualityIsolationHomosexualityAlienation
Book:The Naked Civil Servant
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“He clutched the handle of the knife with the same strength the gang members used to kick him. He was worthless, like a crumpled bit of trash thrown, but not worth picking up, that doesn’t even deserve a courteous foot nudge to hide. He was unseen, like the skin beneath the toga of a female statue made of stone. He was ugly, like the damaged face of the deformed stranger you try not to look at because you don’t want it in your memory. He was as soft as the pull-tab of a soda can, as easily broken as a straw wrapper, and as close to death as a baby slug crawling next to a group of kids at summer camp.”

PainSadnessLonelinessDepressionVulnerabilityIsolationUglinessAlienationSad QuotesThe Goodbye Song
Book:The Goodbye Song
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“My skin yields acne in double digits—a mountainous domain of genetic misfortune. Sometimes in the morning, the pimples get so bad that if I rinse my face towards the showerhead, the water breaks the pustule and I start to bleed. So I shower the same way I behave in public: with my head down. At bedtime, I get stiff because as soon as I turn to one side and sleep, I’ll wake up with a bloody pillowcase.”

PainSadnessLonelinessHumiliationUglinessAlienationThe Goodbye SongPimplesAcne
Book:The Goodbye Song
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“We speak more freely of our emotional complexes than of our material condition or of our socio-professional milieu; we prefer to ask ourselves about the homosexual component of our characters than about the history which has made us and which we have made. We too are victims and accomplices of alienation, reification, mystification. We too stagger beneath 'the weight of things said and done', of lies accepted and transmitted without belief. But we have no wish to know it. We are like sleepwalkers treading in a gutter, dreaming of our genitals rather than looking at our feet.”

LiesAlienationMarxismPsychoanalysisWestern World
Book:Between Existentialism and Marxism
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“The problem arises when a society respects its scholars lesser and lesser and replaces intellectualism with anti-intellectualism. Such society forces the most intellectual members of its, toward alienation and instead develops populism and irrationalism and then calls it anti-elitism. On the other hand, scholars, due to being undermined by the society, find any effort hopeless and isolate themselves into their work. For a scholar, personally, nothing changes because the scholar always is a scholar no matter having someone to share the knowledge with or not, but the true problem forms in the most ordinary sections of the society, which eventually creates an opportunity for propaganda, conspiracy theories, rhetoric, and bogus.”

ProblemKnowledgeSocietyIntellectualRespectPropagandaConspiracyScholarRhetoricAlienationIntellectualismConspiracy TheoriesAnti IntellectualismScholarsBogusIrrationalismUnderminedAnti Elitism
Author:Kambiz Shabankare
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“In a relationship with God, our most secret places once thickly cloaked and meticulously hidden away now stand before us utterly and entirely exposed. And it may be that this dreaded fear is the single thing that keeps us an arm’s length from God, and forever a single step away from His blessings.”

GodChristianFearSinChristianityRelationshipBlessingBibleShameDistanceAshamedBiblicalEmbarrassedAlienationEmbarrassmentSabotageSinfulDistantAlienate
Author:Craig D. Lounsbrough
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“When significant proportions of our time are spent working, recuperating from work, compensating for work, or doing the many things necessary in order to find, prepare for, and hold on to work, it becomes increasingly difficult to say how much of our time is truly our own. [ch.three]”

WorkAlienationSelf Actualization
Book:The Refusal of Work: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Work
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“The development of productive technologies offered western society a choice: to have more leisure time, or to increase the production and consumption of consumer goods. Capitalism took us down the latter path, and the Utopian dream of ease and leisure for all was buried under a mountain of commodities. [ch.three]”

WorkCapitalismConsumerismAlienation
Book:The Refusal of Work: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Work
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“It is the disaster of our entire existence that we live thus away from our soul, and stand in such dread of its slightest movement. Did we but allow it to smile frankly in its silence and its radiance, we should be already living an eternal life. We have only to think for an instant how much it succeeds in accomplishing during those rare moments when we knock off its chains – for it is our custom to enchain it as though it were distraught – what it does in love, for instance, for there we do permit it at times to approach the lattices of external life.”

LoveSoulSilenceAlienationEternal Life
Book:The Treasure of the Humble
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“Through its creative power, art may trigger approximation, reconciliation and harmonization between individuals and peoples. Through art, beings can meet and exchange their points of view, as it rules out alienation, and arouses chemistry and understanding. By definition, art is universal and helps to cross borders and barriers without prejudice.”

ArtUnderstandingCreativeBordersChemistryAlienationReconciliationApproximationHarmonization
Author:Erik Pevernagie
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“Meditation is the beginning of becoming  part of existence. The ego creates a separation from existence. The moment we drop the ego, then we find our roots in existence. Then there is no separation anywhere.  Then  God beats in our heart. The same God that flows in the rivers and rises in the sun, circulates in our blood. It is all one. But the contemporary man feels separated and alienated. Never before has it happened on such a vast scale. Almost everybody who is intelligent feels uprooted and alienated. And of one feels alienated, life cannot be a joy. Life is a joy only when we start feeling a home in existence.  Meditation is a help to feel at home with existence, with the trees, the earth, the people and with the animals. Only this experience makes one religious.”

LoveLifeGodJoyMeditationRiversAnimalsTreesAlienation
Book:Man is Part of the Whole: Silence, Love, Joy, Truth, Compassion, Freedom and Grace
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“Or how does it happen that trade, which after all is nothing more than the exchange of products of various individuals and countries, rules the whole world through the relation of supply and demand—a relation which, as an English economist says, hovers over the earth like the fate of the ancients, and with invisible hand allots fortune and misfortune to men, sets up empires and overthrows empires, causes nations to rise and to disappear—while with the abolition of the basis of private property, with the communistic regulation of production (and implicit in this, the destruction of the alien relation between men and what they themselves produce), the power of the relation of supply and demand is dissolved into nothing, and men get exchange, production, the mode of their mutual relation, under their own control again?”

NationsFateCapitalismEconomicsTradeCommunismEmpiresAlienationSupply And DemandProductionInvisible HandExchangeEconomiesGlobal Trade
Book:The German Ideology / Theses on Feuerbach / Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy
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“The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man – state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion. Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo. Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself. It is, therefore, the task of history, once the other-world of truth has vanished, to establish the truth of this world. It is the immediate task of philosophy, which is in the service of history, to unmask self-estrangement in its unholy forms once the holy form of human self-estrangement has been unmasked. Thus, the criticism of Heaven turns into the criticism of Earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics.”

ReligionHumanismAlienation
Author:Karl Marx
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“We aren't human." "Yes. We. Are." His voice turns fierce. "I don't give a shit what the something-somethingth council of big important farts decreed, or how the geomests classify things, or any of that. That we're not human is just the lie they tell themselves so they don't have to feel bad about how they treat us.”

HumanityOppressionLabelsAlienationOutcastClassificationLabelingCasteCaste SystemTaxonomyOutcasts
Book:The Fifth Season
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“If, by the virtue of charity or the circumstance of desperation, you ever chance to spend a little time around a Substance-recovery halfway facility like Enfield MA's state-funded Ennet House, you will acquire many exotic new facts [...] That certain persons simply will not like you no matter what you do. Then that most nonaddicted adult civilians have already absorbed and accepted this fact, often rather early on [...] That sleeping can be a form of emotional escape and can with sustained effort be abused [...] That purposeful sleep-deprivation can also be an abusable escape. That gambling can be an abusable escape, too, and work, shopping, and shoplifting, and sex, and abstention, and masturbation, and food, and exercise, and meditation/prayer [...] That loneliness is not a function of solitude [...] That if enough people in a silent room are drinking coffee it is possible to make out the sound of steam coming off the coffee. That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt [...] That there is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness [...] That the effects of too many cups of coffee are in no way pleasant or intoxicating [...] That if you do something nice for somebody in secret, anonymously, without letting the person you did it for know it was you or anybody else know what it was you did or in any way or form trying to get credit for it, it's almost its own form of intoxicating buzz. That anonymous generosity, too, can be abused [...] That it is permissible to want [...] That there might not be angels, but there are people who might as well be angels.”

KindnessLonelinessAddictionAlienation
Book:Infinite Jest
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“Men are like children, in that, if you spoil them, they become naughty. Therefore it is well not to be too indulgent or charitable with anyone. You may take it as a general rule that you will not lose a friend by refusing him a loan, but that you are very likely to do so by granting it; and, for similar reasons, you will not readily alienate people by being somewhat proud and careless in your behavior; but if you are very kind and complaisant towards them, you will often make them arrogant and intolerable, and so a breach will ensue.”

KindnessCharityArroganceAlienationTaking People For Granted
Book:The Wisdom of Life and Counsels and Maxims
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“Whatever it may be that comes to us from elsewhere, even the worst exploitation, the very fact that it comes from somewhere else is positive. This is why alienation has its advantages, even though it is so often denounced as the dispossession of the self, with the other treated in consequence as an age-old enemy holding the alienated part of us captive. The inverse theory, that of disalienation, is equally simplistic, holding as it does that the subject merely has to reappropriate his alienated will and his alienated desire. From this perspective everything that befalls the subject as a result of his own efforts is good, because it is authentic; while everything that comes from outside the subject is dubbed inauthentic, merely because it does not fall within the sphere of his freedom. Exactly the opposite position is the one that has to be stressed, while at the same time broadening the paradox. For just as it is better to be controlled by someone else rather than by oneself, it is likewise always better to be made happy, or unhappy, by someone else rather than by oneself. It is always better to depend in life on something that does not depend on us. In this way I can avoid any kind of servitude. I am not obliged to submit to something that does not depend on me - including my own existence. I am free of my birth - and in the same sense I can be free of my death. There has never been any true freedom apart from this one. The source of all interplay, of everything that is in play, of all passion, of all seduction, is that which is completely foreign to us, yet has power over us. That which is Other, that which we have to seduce.”

FreedomPositive ThinkingPositive LifeAlienationDependency
Book:The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena
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“He was disappointed in it all. He had developed into an alien. As the steam beer had tasted raw, so their companionship seemed raw to him. He was too far removed. Too many thousands of opened books yawned between them and him. He had exiled himself. He had travelled in the vast realm of intellect until he could no longer return home. On the other hand, he was human, and his gregarious need for companionship remained unsatisfied. He had found no new home.”

LifeDisappointmentAlienation
Book:Martin Eden
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“At the top of the slope on the perimeter of the site, overlooking six lanes of motorway, is a diner frequented by lorry drivers who have either just unloaded or or are waiting to pick up their cargo. Anyone nursing a disappointment with domestic life would find relief in this tiled, brightly lit cafeteria with its smells of fries and petrol, for it has the reassuring feel of a place where everyone is just passing through--and which therefore has none of the close-knit or convivial atmosphere which could cast a humiliating light on one's own alienation. It suggests itself as an ideal location for Christmas lunch for those let down by their families.”

TravelDisappointmentAlienationAnonymityCafeteriaDinerMotorways
Book:The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
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