Social Alienation Quotes

Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.

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.

In solitude the lonely man is eaten up by himself, among crowds by the many.

It is in the nature of political bodies always to see the evil in the opposite group, just as the individual has an ineradicable tendency to get rid of everything he does not know and does not want to know about himself by foisting it off on somebody else. Nothing has a more diverse and alienating effect upon society than this moral complacency and lack of responsibility, and nothing promotes understanding and rapprochement more than the mutual withdrawal of projections.

It is not a sufficient answer to say that the Jewish child need not join in the singing or the pageant if he does not want to. It is unfair and unconscionable to place on the child the burden of isolating himself from his classmates, to stand alone during the festivities and preparations for them which in many schools occupy practically all the time in December.

…it was the nature of man, when told that he should be shunned and despised and condemned as the cause of all the vice and misery and crime in the land, to retreat within himself, close all the avenues to his head and his heart.

To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.

We have not confronted forcefully enough the intolerance, sectarianism, and hopelessness that feeds violent extremism in too many parts of the globe.

You are all a lost generation," Gertrude Stein said to Hemingway. We weren't lost. We knew where we were, all right, but we wouldn't go home. Ours was the generation that stayed up all night.

Black people should have recognition for themselves and their backgrounds and their relationships with other people in the world and thus lose some of their alienation. This museum has certainly stood for that in this town.

Terrorism really flourishes in areas of poverty, despair and hopelessness, where people see no future

Kafka is not interested in documenting the manners and mores of any particular place; he is not interested in probing the psyche of individual characters.

I've been an outsider all my life - I don't care.

When a man sits in our jails for a number of years, and around him friends and family become angry, that is how we create terrorists.

Mystical state, madness, how it frightens people. How utterly crazy they become, remote, rude, peculiar, cruel, taunting, farouche as wild beasts who have smelled danger, the unthinkable.

I feel like everybody's always out to get me, and that's a weird feeling.

All those people who go to NASCAR and sing country & western songs and live in Tennessee, they totally ignore me, they don't come to my shows, I just don't exist for them and they don't exist for me.

... the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be.

A lonely man is a lonesome thing, a stone, a bone, a stick, a receptacle for Gilbey's gin, a stooped figure sitting at the edge of a hotel bed, heaving copious sighs like the autumn wind.

Capital, created by the labour of the worker, crushes the worker, ruining small proprietors and creating an army of unemployed.

Offended vanity is the great separator in social life.

I grew up with this crazy upbringing of living many places and always being the new kid in town, not like a service brat where you're always going to school with other new kids in town. I was constantly arriving in small towns and going to school with kids who'd been together since they were in kindergarten.

I've never been able to relate to many people. I've always been the outcast child. I don't follow the rules. That's kind of how I do everything. Through my music, I've found a place in the world where I'm accepted, so I'm happy.

I became a loner. I became a mountain man. A lot of those things are very good qualities and they help you do your work, help you be singular and keep the artistic integrity of your work intact, but they don't make it very easy to live your life.

I think art comes from some sense of discomfort with the world, some sense of not quite fitting with it.