ALIENATION
QUOTES
(Click
on *
for 8.5 X 11 PDF to print)
Exploitation, alienation, poverty, disempowerment,
fragmenting and debilitating labor, production
for the profit of a few -- much less harsh homelessness,
starvation, and degradation -- are not like gravity.
They arise from institutional relations established
by human beings. New institutions, also established
by human beings, can generate other vastly superior
outcomes. Defining and working to attain those
new institutions ought to be our economic agenda.
-- Michael Albert
I
think it must be conceded that it is possible
to create a society in which the response to market
failure is not a swing to socialism, but an exacerbation
of individual efforts to stay ahead by making
and spending yet more money. Does the public health
service have long waiting lists and inadequate
facilities? Buy private insurance. Has public
transport broken down? Buy a car for each member
of the family above driving age. Has the countryside
been built over or the footpaths eradicated? Buy
some elaborate exercise machinery and work out
at home. Is air pollution intolerable? Buy an
air-filtering unit and stay indoors. Is what comes
out of the tap foul to the taste and chock-full
of carcinogens? Buy bottled water. And so on.
We know it can all happen because it has: I have
been doing little more than describing Southern
California. Now it is worth noticing two things
about the private substitutes that I have described.
The first is that in the aggregate they are probably
much more expensive than would be the implementation
of the appropriate public policy. The second is
that they are extremely poor replacements for
the missing outcomes of good public policy. Nevertheless,
it is plain that the members of a society can
become so alienated from one another, so mistrustful
of any form of collective action, that they prefer
to go it alone.
-- Brian Barry
|
*
"The natural world is the larger sacred
community to which we belong. To be alienated
from this community is to become destitute in
all that makes us human. To damage this community
is to diminish our own existence."
~ Thomas
Berry
|
|
By
alienation is meant a mode of experience in which
the person experiences himself as an alien. He has
become, one might say, estranged from himself. He
does not experience himself as the center of his
world, as the creator of his own acts -- but his
acts and their consequences have become his masters,
whom he obeys, or whom he may even worship. The
alienated person is out of touch with himself as
he is out of touch with any other person. He, like
the others, is experienced as things are experienced;
with the senses and with common sense, but at the
same time without being related to oneself and to
the world outside positively.
-- Erich Fromm |
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.
-- Vaclav
Havel |
|
“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.”
-- Michael Jackson
Family
traditions counter alienation and confusion.
They help us define who we are; they provide something
steady, reliable and safe in a confusing world.
-- Susan Lieberman
Young
alienation, disappointment and heartache is all a part
of the first real growing up that we do.
-- Judd Nelson
|
“When
our government is spoken of as some menacing,
threatening foreign entity, it ignores the fact
that, in our democracy, government is us.”
-- Barack
Obama
|
In
our hectic, fast-paced, consumer-driven society,
it's not uncommon for people to feel overwhelmed,
isolated, alone, and even alienated. Many are
re-discovering the healing and empowering role
that community can bring to our lives. The sense
of belonging we feel when we make the time to
take an active role in our communities can give
us a deeper sense of meaning and purpose.
-- Robert
Alan Silverstein
|
|
I
don't want to express alienation. It isn't what
I feel. I'm interested in various kinds of passionate
engagement. All my work says be serious, be
passionate, wake up.
-- Susan
Sontag
|
|
Another
cause for the increase in alienation and cynicism
is a feeling that too many policy decisions that affect
individuals
have been taken out of any system that has accountability
or that they can influence.
-- Robert Teeter
"A
reform in the system of criminal jurisprudence,
by which the death penalty shall no longer be
inflicted . . . and by which our so-called prisons
shall be virtually transformed into vast reformatory
workshops, from which the unfortunate may emerge
to be useful members of society, instead of the
alienated citizens they now are."
-- Victoria
Woodhull
|
|
|
|
|