Alienation from Society Quotes

We have often had this particular exchange about climate and landscape and why we both feel so lonely here uprooted. It was what each of us had wanted of course.Besides wanting to experience a place we hated, we wanted to be insomniacs and loners, losers and drop-outs. To know the sky was the only location of meaning and joy left to us.

I endeavored to renounce society, that I might avoid temptation. But it was a poor religion; so far as it prevailed, only tended to make me gloomy, stupid, unsociable, and useless.

Much as the sage may affect to despise the opinion of the world, there are few who would not rather expose their lives a hundred times than be condemned to live on, in society, but not of it - a by-word of reproach to all who know their history, and a mark for scorn to point his finger at.

Once I thought that to be human was the highest aim a man could have, but I see now that it was meant to destroy me. To-day I am proud to say that I am inhuman, that I belong not to men and governments, that I have nothing to do with creeds and principles. I have nothing to do with the creaking machinery of humanity - I belong to the earth!

Whenever I tell people I'm a misanthrope they react as though that's a bad thing, the idiots. I live in London, for God's sake. Have you walked down Oxford Street recently? Misanthropy's the only thing that gets you through it. It's not a personality flaw, it's a skill.

I come from what they call the land of nowhere. I'm from the suburb. It's extremely atomizing.

I think we are isolating ourselves, and in so isolating ourselves, I think we're minimizing ourselves, I don't think we are taken as seriously today as we were a few years ago.

You can't put abandonment and alienation under arrest.

So I, for one, didn't feel alienated by what happened in 77.

The real evil isn't the objects of technology but the tendency of technology to isolate people into lonely attitudes of objectivity. It's the objectivity, the dualistic way of looking at things underlying technology, that produces the evil.

A man must be in sympathy with society around him, or else, not wish to be in sympathy with it. If neither of these two, he must be wretched.

The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters, - a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man. Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, into many things. The planter, who is Man sent out into the field to gather food, is seldom cheered by any idea of the true dignity of his ministry. He sees his bushel and his cart, and nothing beyond, and sinks into the farmer, instead of Man on the farm.

The child is essentially alien to this society of men and might express his position in the words of the Gospel: My kingdom is not of this world

You don't write a novel out of sheer pity any more than you blow a safe out of a vague longing to be rich. A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery.

I feel like humans are a disease. It's a hard thing to communicate in a pop song. I mean, who wants to hear that?

It must be terrible to have to live among people and not like human nature.