The eternal problem of the human being is how to structure his waking hours. In this existential sense, the function of all social living is to lend mutual assistance for this project.

In pursuit of human happiness, we are ripping the planet apart.

Human problem is not enough attention, but too much information.

Оf аll the іnsаne рeорle іn the wоrld, nіnety-nіne оut оf а hundred hаve trіed tо reрress theіr seхuаl energy. Аnd yоu mаy be аwаre thаt аs сіvіlіzаtіоn hаs develорed, іnsаnіty hаs іnсreаsed beсаuse сіvіlіzed sосіety suррresses seх mоre thаn аnythіng else.

The humаn mіnd's greаtest dіseаse іs іts tendenсy tо gо tо the eхtremes.

Fоr twenty-fоur hоurs а dаy yоu аre lооkіng fоr wаys tо fоrget yоur раіn: tаlkіng tо рeорle, lіstenіng tо musіс, drіnkіng аlсоhоl, рlаyіng саrds, gаmblіng оr gettіng іnvоlved іn sоme оther mіsсhіef where yоu саn fоrget yоurself, sо thаt yоu fоrget thаt yоu hаve sо muсh раіn іnsіde. Fоr twenty-fоur hоurs а dаy yоu аre lооkіng fоr wаys tо fоrget yоurself.

This planet has — or rather had — a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much all of the time.

These acts of ritualized destruction are known by anthropologists as “degradation ceremonies.” Their purpose is to allow the public to single out and denounce one of its members. To lower their status or expel them from the group. To collectively take out our anger at them by stripping them of their dignity. It is a we-versus-you scenario with deep biological roots. By the end of it the disgraced person’s status is cemented as “not one of us.” Everything about them is torn down and rewritten.

For all species other than us humans, things just are what they are. Our problem is that we’re always trying to figure out what things mean—why things are the way they are.

I can tell you, little man, because when you came to me with your inner emptiness or your impotence or your psychic disorder, I learned to recognize you as a rigid animal. You can only gobble and take, you're incapable of creating or giving, because your basic bodily attitude is one of holding back and of defiant mistrust; because you panic when the primordial impulse to love and to give stirs in you. That's why you're afraid of giving. And essentially your way of taking means only one thing: you have to stuff yourself full of money, food, happiness, and knowledge, because you feel empty, starved, and unhappy, devoid both of true knowledge and the desire for knowledge.

You'll wake up from your nightmare, little man, and find yourself lying helpless on the ground, because you steal from the giver and give to the thief.

You yourself hate your hatred, you can't stand yourself, and you're desperate. And that, little woman, is why you destroyed your husband's life.

He tried to deny his animal mortality by establishing a family name fortune that would live forever. That meant grabbing more land than he needed (something a rhinoceros would never do), building himself an impregnable, cold, stone-towered place in which to live (something a bear would never do), sticking a chastity belt on his wife to insure that his seed would continue through his son, terrorizing the son to insure he'd "respect" his father and not slit his throat in the night, and finally, cementing the whole thing together with a powerful code of "morality" backed up by fear and force.

But man, having fashioned himself a jail-like body, has imprisoned himself in jail-like cities and jail-like civilizations.

The prison that man has created for himself is stronger than any put up by governments. It's the prison of his own character structure and he recreates it in each of his children.

Human is to be a predator, kill or get killed, eliminate or be eliminated while fighting own fight instinct.

I'm such a negative person, and always have been. Was I born that way? I don't know. I am constantly disgusted by reality, horrified and afraid. I cling desperately to the few things that give me some solace, that make me feel good.

I hate most of humanity. Though I might be very fond of particular individuals, humanity in general fills me with contempt and despair. I hate most of what passes for civilization. I hate the modern world. For one thing there are just too goddamn many people. I hate the hordes, the crowds in their vast cities, with all their hateful vehicles, their noise, their constant meaningless comings and goings. I hate cars. I hate modern architecture. Every building built after 1955 should be torn down!

I despise modern popular music. Words cannot express how much it gets on my nerves—the false, pretentious, smug assertiveness of it. I hate business, having to deal with money. Money is one of the most hateful inventions of the human race. I hate the commodity culture, in which everything is bought and sold. No stone is left unturned. I hate the mass media, and how passively people suck it up.

I hate having to get up in the morning and face another day of this insanity. I hate having to eat, shit, maintain the body—I hate my body. The thought of my internal functions, the organs, digestion, the brain, the nervous system, horrify me

Nature is horrible. It's not cute and lovable. It's kill or be killed. It's very dangerous out there. The natural worls is filled with scary, murderous creatures and forces. I hate the whole way that nature functions. Sex is especially hateful and horrifying, the male penetrating the female, hos dick goes into her hole, she's impregnated, another being grows indide her, and then she must go through a painful ordeal as the new being pushes out of her, only to repeat the whole process in its time. Reproduction - what could be more existentially repulsive?!

How I hate the courting ritual! I was always repelled by my own sex drive, which in my youth, never left me alone. I was contantly driven by frustrared desires to do bizarre and unacceptable things with and to women. My soul was in constant conflict about it. I never was able to resolve it. Old age is the only relief.

I hate the way the human psyche works, the way we are traumatized and stupidly imprinted in early childhood and have to spend the rest of our lives trying to overcome these infantile mental fixations. And we never fully succeed in this endeavor.

I hate organized religions. I hate governments. It's all a lot of power games played out by ambition-driven people, and foisted on the weak, the poor, and on children. Most humans are bullies. Adults pick on children. Older children pick on younger children. Men bully women. The rich bully the poor. People love to dominate.

I hate the way humans worship power—one of the most disgusting of all human traits. I hate the human tendency toward revenge and vindictiveness. I hate the way humans are constantly trying to trick and deceive one another, to swindle, cheat, and take unfair advantage of the innocent, the naïve and the ignorant.

I hate all the vacuous, false, banal conversation that goes on among people. Sometimes I feel suffocated. I want to flee from it.

For me, to be human is, for the most part, to hate what I am. When I suddenly realize that I am one of them, I want to scream in horror.

"Hell is other people" --Jean-Paul Sartre
"Hell is also yourself" --R. Crumb

The tragedy of man is that, like the dog, his character can be moulded. You cannot mould the character of a cat. You can give a dog a bad conscience, but you cannot give a conscience to a cat. Yet most people prefer dogs because their obedience and their flattering tail-wagging afford visible proof of the master's superiority and worth.

Conditioned children of both sexes are often incapable of loving. This news may be comforting to those who fear sex; but to youth in general, the inability to love is a great human tragedy.

One evil of humanity is that we persist in telling children how to live. All our educational systems strive to mould them in the image of their elders, and the children in turn mould their children, and one result is a very sick world full of crime and hate and wars. Thus, the vicious circle persists, and millions of children are unhappy and tense in mind and body. The weight of this tradition is so heavy that only one man in a thousand can ever challenge or even want to challenge the morals and taboos of society.

Our schools' chief function is to kill the life of children. Otherwise the Establishment would be powerless. Would millions of free men allow themselves to be sacrificed to causes they had no interest in and did not understand? Is the future of humanity one of slaves ruled by an élite of powerful masters?

I learned that the problem of the world is a problem of the human heart, a moral problem. And I learned more about nature of morality than any book or any professor had ever taught me. I lived through, even through vicariously, the problems of ethics. I learned also that the economic and political problems with which we are so much concerned are trivial as compared with the problems of the human soul with which we are so little concerned. War and peace, I now know, are not problems of politics or economics, of geography or bureaucracy. Rather they are problems of the human heart. No business man can fathom them, no senator, no journalist, no diplomat. The so-called peace conference in Paris is like the babble of spiritual midgets discussing the affairs of Lilliput. What we need is a new set of leaders, moral leaders.

We are a society of notoriously unhappy people: lonely, anxious, depressed, destructive, dependent - people who are glad when we have killed the time we are trying so hard to save.

To be an egoist refers not only to my behavior but to my character. It means: that I want everything for myself; that possessing, not sharing, gives me pleasure; that I must become greedy because if my aim is having, I am more the more I have; that I must feel antagonistic towad all others: my customers whom I want to deceive, my competitors whom I want to destroy, my workers whom I want to exploit. I can never be satisfied, because there is no end to my wishes; I must by envious of of those who have more and afraid of those who have less. But I have to repress all these feelings in order to represent my self (to others as well as to myself) as the similing, rational, sincere, kind human being everybody pretends to be.

The growing person is forced to give up most of his or her autonomous, genuine desires and interests, and his of her own will, and to adopt a will and desires and feelings that are not autonomous but superimposed by the social patterns of thought and feeling. Society, and the family as its psychosocial agent, has to solve a difficult problem: How to break a person's will without his being aware of it? Yet by a complicated process of indoctrination, rewards, punishments, and fitting ideology, it solves this task by and large so well that most people believe they are following their own will and are unaware that their will itself is conditioned and manipulated.

Indeed, a great deal of our energy is used to hide from ourselves what we know, and the degree of such repressed knowledge can hardly be overestimated.

Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons.