Homo homini lupus [man is wolf to man]. Who in the face of all his experience of life and of history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion?
We are so constituted that we can gain intense pleasure only from the contrast, and only very little from the condition itself.
A person has no need of sincerity, nor even of skill in lying, in order to be loved. Here I mean by love reciprocal torture.
Every woman feels that the greater her power over a man, the more impossible it is to leave him except by sudden flight: a fugitive precisely because a queen.
I spent many a charming evening talking and playing with Albertine, but none so sweet as when I was watching her sleep.
The habit of thinking prevents us at times from experiencing reality, immunises us against it, makes it seem no more than any other thought.
Many people are good at talking about what they are doing, but in fact do little. Others do a lot but don't talk about it; they are the ones who make a community live.
We discover that we are at the same time very insignificant and very important, because each of our actions is preparing the humanity of tomorrow; it is a tiny contribution to the construction of the huge and glorious final humanity
Dan Nilsson even remarks of compound eyes that ‘It is only a small exaggeration to say that evolution seems to be fighting a desperate battle to improve a basically disastrous design.
Arlie Russell Hochschild resume "el daño colateral" fundamental causado en el curso de la invasion consumista en una expresion tan incisiva como sucinta: "la materialización del amor".
Cynicism, like gullibility, is a symptom of underdeveloped critical faculties.
Capitalism puts things (capital) higher than life (labor). Power follows from possession, not from activity.
For centuries kings, priests, feudal lords, industrial bosses and parents have insisted that obedience is a virtue and that disobedience is a vice.
There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them, those we spent with a favorite book.
On no days of our childhood did we live so fully perhaps as those we thought we had left behind without living them, those that we spent with a favourite book.
No days, perhaps, of all our childhood are ever so fully lived are those that we had regarded as not being lived at all: days spent wholly with a favourite book.
What was the freedom to which the adult human being rose in the morning, if each act was held back or inspired by the overpowering ghost of a little child?
There, at her console, he dialed 594: pleased acknowledgement of husband's superior wisdom in all matters
We wish to become one thing or another, rather we wish to become everything and in this pursuit of becoming everything we only end up becoming idiots.
In order to spend out our time (life) we sell some of this time. We work for someone, we labour. In freedom we do slavery.
That we have great men in our time and recent times is not because of our educational system, but rather in spite of it. They are the ones the teachers couldn't spoil.
