Quotes About Alienation

#1. My rage and sense of alienation as to how women have been written, have allowed themselves to be written, in so many ways, has political roots.

Kate Zambreno

#2. We need to move: from a spirituality of alienation from the natural world to a spirituality of intimacy with the natural world from a spirituality of the divine as revealed in words to a spirituality of the divine as revealed in the visible world about us..

Thomas Berry

#3. Huge imbalance in power has resulted in the alienation, rage, fury, and awful amoral terrorism that has erupted and is erupting at the present time. And in order to counter this, we need to make the compassionate voice of religion and morality a dynamic force in our world.

Karen Armstrong

#4. The guy's alone and apart - that's the message.'
'Then perhaps it's what we all feel at times - the hell of alienation'
'Maybe, or what some of us see as the inevitable fall from grace,

Robert Sims

#5. The fact that people are massed anonymously together may be in one sense an alienation, but in another sense it is a condition of their emancipation.

Terry Eagleton

#6. The more media trailed him, the more space he tried to create. He cultivated alienation and used it as a whetstone to stay sharp.

Bonnie D. Ford

#7. The sense of alienation that inspires wonder, awe and fear in us is enough of a proof that life does not belong to the planet Earth.

Raheel Farooq

#8. Grounding is not dull and lifeless, but dynamic and vibrant. Generally it is our tension that makes us lethargic, and tension results from alienation between various parts of ourselves. As these parts are simplified and integrated, we experience increased vitality.

Anodea Judith

#9. The largely hidden key to the symbolic world is time; indeed it is at the origin of human symbolic activity. Time thus occasions the first alienation, the route away from aboriginal richness and wholeness.

John Zerzan

#10. Most institutions of higher learning in the West were founded by and for religious denominations. The supposed alienation of education and faith is a recent phenomenon. At the same time, neither education nor the lack of it predisposes one to faith.

Marilynne Robinson

#11. There is no alienation that a little power will not cure.

Eric Hoffer

#12. While the West tries to turn its civilization into cultural variety hour, Islam tries to turn Muslim lands into a cultural monolith. The same West that justifies the rap culture thinks that every Muslim terrorist bombing is an expression of economic angst or social alienation.

Ben Shapiro

#13. The problem that will doubtless interest future historians is not so much the presence, in the twentieth century, of mass political alienation, but the passivity with which the citizenry accepted that condition. It may well become known as the century of sophisticated deference.

Lawrence Goodwyn

#14. All of their faces are cluttered with the shrapnel of rebellion, as if a grenade of alienation has exploded in their midst, piercing every possible soft point of flesh-from earlobes and nostrils to eyebrows, lips, and tongues-with metal studs and rings.

Jonathan Tropper

#15. Man's alienation from man must lead in time to man's alienation from God

Robert Nisbet

#16. Marks of Identity is, among other things, the expression of the process of alienation in a contemporary intellectual with respect to his own country.

Juan Goytisolo

#17. Generally speaking, punishment makes men hard and cold; it concentrates; it sharpens the feeling of alienation; it strengthens the power of resistance

Friedrich Nietzsche

#18. Since Jesus became thoroughly identified with sin, he would receive its wrath and judgment in our place. This meant he would experience the worst kind of rejection and alienation from the Father, and he would do this for us.

Edward T. Welch

#19. When you stop to think about it, so many films today where we don't have that kind of contact are films about alienation. About alienated feelings. We are much more alienated from our colleagues nowadays.

Elmer Bernstein

#20. People talk about alienation in the city. Diners are a place where you feel comfortable, an extension of your house.

Richard Greenberg

#21. Alienation, I suppose, can't be hackneyed because it will always exist.

Mike Birbiglia

#22. Mankind's self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.

Jerry Mander

#23. Everyone has experienced alienation - at some point you go through a moment where you say: "I just want to be left alone." And what is the ultimate point of being alone? - it's dying, of course.

Tobias Segal

#24. I'm the classic example of alienation: I grew up in a middle-class household without art or books. I was going to be a chemical engineer until I went to the theatre for the first time at 16 and was blown away by it.

Richard Eyre

#25. The reason that I like SF and fantasy and horror is that to me it's the pulp wing of surrealism. That's the aesthetic of undermining and creative alienation that I really go for.

China Mieville

#26. Because of their historical theory of the "alienation of labor" (that the worker must become less and less in control of the work of his hands) the Marxist parties never fought for the man-worthy job itself.

Paul Goodman

#27. We are at home here. Alienation is unnecessary. Contact with reality at a deep level is part of the Christian's life. He enters into reality, rather than escaping from it. The flight from reality is a mark of Eastern and classical mysticism, not of Christianity.

Hans Rookmaaker

#28. Anthropology has always struggled with an intense, fascinated repulsion towards its subject ... [The anthropologist] submits himself to the exotic to confirm his own inner alienation as an urban intellectual.

Susan Sontag

#29. And to the degree that the individual maintains a show before others that he himself does not believe, he can come to experience a special kind of alienation from self and a special kind of wariness of others.

Erving Goffman

#30. Quite often, the consequence of gaining literacy or critical consciousness is alienation not just from the values of the dominant culture, but from the ways of knowing and being that characterize one's own immediate family and community.

Margo V. Perkins

#31. Modern capitalism, organising the reduction of all social life to a spectacle, cannot offer any spectacle other than that of our own alienation.

Attila Kotanyi

#32. If there is one thing I detest, it's when people transform their powerlessness or alienation into a creed.

Muriel Barbery

#33. Behind the masks of total choice, different forms of the same alienation confront each other.

Guy Debord

#34. Nature-deficit disorder describes the human costs of alienation from nature, among them: diminished use of the senses, attention difficulties, and higher rates of physical and emotional illness. This disorder can be detected in individuals, families, and communities.

Richard Louv

#35. [the abject] is simply a frontier, a repulsive gift that the Other, having become alter ego, drops so that the "I" does not disappear in it but finds, in that sublime alienation, a forfeited existence.

Julia Kristeva

#36. The alienation effect in German epic theater is achieved not only through the actors, but also through music (chorus and song) andsets (transparencies, film strips, etc.). Its main purpose is to place the staged events in their historical context.

Bertolt Brecht

#37. Photography is the product of complete alienation.

Marcel Proust

#38. The ultimate and most important revolutionary aspiration: to see human beings liberated from their alienation

Che Guevara

#39. Living in the limelight: the universal dream for those who wish to SEEM. Those who wish to BE, must put aside the alienation, get on with the fascination, the real relation, the underlying theme.

Neil Peart

#40. In the 19th century inhumanity meant cruelty; in the 20th century it means schizoid self-alienation.

Erich Fromm

#41. I was conscious all the time that I was following mad whims without being able to do anything about it ... . Despite my alienation from myself at that moment, and even though I was nothing but a battleground for invisible forces, I was aware of every detail of what was going on around me.

Knut Hamsun

#42. I think, increasingly, despite what we are being told is an ever more open world of communication, there is a terrible alienation in the ordinary man between what he is being told and what he secretly believes.

John Le Carre

#43. What I wanted to try and figure out was, okay, in contemporary 21st century life the alienation between the self and the land around you or the self and even the urban landscape. You name it.

DJ Spooky

#44. The great omission in American life is solitude; not loneliness, for this is an alienation that thrives most in the midst of crowds, but that zone of time and space, free from the outside pressures, which is the incubator of the spirit.

Marya Mannes

#45. Loving-kindness challenges those states that tend to arise when we think of ourselves as isolated from everyone else - fear, a sense of deficiency, alienation, loneliness.

Sharon Salzberg

#46. The U.S. will never be a free and happy nation while they continue to exploit and marginalize the Third World. The Third World will never be happy or free so long as there is a First World stuck in the mire of consumerism, alienation, indifference. (Clodovis Boff, p. 161)

Mev Puleo

#47. [Our errors] represent a moment of alienation, both from ourselves and from a previously convincing vision of the world. But what's wrong with that? "To alienate" means to make unfamiliar; and to see things - including ourselves - as unfamiliar is an opportunity to see them anew.

Kathryn Schulz

#48. College campuses are populated by and endless throng of happy, dancing, fully conversational creatures who seem to exist from the sole purpose of reinforcing your utter alienation. I tried to take comfort in the fact that hell is other people and ultimately we are alone anyway.

Jacqueline Novak

#49. One single gift acknowledged in gratefulness has the power to dissolve the ties of our alienation.

David Steindl-Rast

#50. That's why there is such alienation, depression, and despair in our society - because the means we're employing doesn't lead to the ends we desire, no matter how hard we work, nor how much "stuff" we accumulate.

Tim DeChristopher

#51. Alienation and loneliness became a cable that stretched hundreds of miles long, pulled to the breaking point by a gigantic winch. And through that taut line, day and night, he received indecipherable messages.

Haruki Murakami

#52. There was alienation in the standing consciousness that his squareness would not fit the round hole that had been prepared for him.

Thomas Hardy

#53. American culture never necessarily made sense to me, but they should warn you: leaving comes with a huge sense of alienation that never goes away.

Jessa Crispin

#54. I think the degree of alienation and despair is more universal.

Terry Southern

#55. Thus in Christianity the alienation had become total, and it was this total alienation that was the biggest obstacle to the progress of self-consciousness.

Bruno Bauer

#56. Language is almost the most unique creation of humankind which defines itself; the alternative way of communication/comprehension/conception, yet overusing any invention, can cause Alienation.

Fereidoon Yazdi

#57. In medieval times, if someone displayed the symptoms we now identify as boredom, that person was thought to be committing something called acedia, a 'dangerous form of spiritual alienation'
a devaluing of the world and its creator.

Richard Louv

#58. The cost of sanity in this society, is a certain level of alienation

Terence McKenna

#59. As the mother of a son, I do not accept that alienation from me is necessary for his discovery of himself. As a woman, I will not cooperate in demeaning womanly things so that he can be proud to be a man. I like to think the women in my son's future are counting on me.

Letty Cottin Pogrebin

#60. Alienation between the content and form happens frequently in my poems because I obstinately carry on dismantling my body, an act you can also call "dismantling delusion." I think that after I dismantle my female body, I can finally dismantle established lyric poems.

Kim Hyesoon

#61. 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.

Katherine Dunham

#62. What is alienation? Thought.

Marty Rubin

#63. Large, centralized organizations foster alienation like stagnant ponds breed algae.

Ricardo Semler

#64. I guess lyrically they're similar because they're talking about escaping the kind of misery that likes company. 'The Last One Alive,' for me, is very simple. It's just about alienation, really, that causes anger.

Jon Crosby

#65. The overall impact of postmodernism is that many other groups now share with black folks a sense of deep alienation, despair, uncertainty, loss of sense of grounding even if it is not informed by shared circumstance.

Bell Hooks

#66. That anyone should need to write a book advising people to "eat food" could be taken as a measure of our alienation and confusion. Or we can choose to see it in a more positive light and count ourselves fortunate indeed that there is once again real food for us to eat.

Michael Pollan

#67. Songs don't have to be about going out on Saturday night and having a good rink-up and driving home and crashing cars. A lot of what I've done is about alienation ... about where you fit in society.

David Bowie

#68. Idealization of a group is a natural consequence of separation from the group; in other words, it is a by-product of alienation.

Paula Gunn Allen

#69. What's wrong with us isn't a rap sheet of bad deeds, but a damaged heart, a soul-sickness, that plunges us into fearful self-protection, alienation from God and others.

Frederica Mathewes-Green

#70. Did you ever notice how the words Attention and Alienation look the same when you are staring at them from a distance?

Alisia Compton

#71. 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

#72. To me, "queerness" is an alienation from a heteronormative code that governs bodies, genders, and their processes - sexuality, birth, death, and inheritance - in order to preserve social, economic, and political power for those who have it [and] to continue it into future generations.

Kazim Ali

#73. 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.

Nelson Algren

#74. I try not to put messages in my songs. My only message is man's communication with his fellow man. I want to narrow the gap of strangeness and alienation.

Rod McKuen

#75. A now notorious first fall into alienation, habituating people to abstract the world into printed words,

Susan Sontag

#76. Suffered from alienation,carried the weight on my own,had to be so strong,so I believed,and now I know I've succeeded,in finding the place I conceived.

Mariah Carey

#77. Do not waste the moment of your life which comes together with death because you will bitterly regret the alienation of your own self.

Sorin Cerin

#78. In fact, no form of death places a greater burden on society than suicide, for the act of suicide is the way a person seeks to resolve his alienation from a cooperative society.

Shinmon Aoki

#79. We have witnessed the terrible increases in the incidence of alcoholism, the advent of drug dependency, the protests, marches, strikes and human alienation.

Alex Campbell

#80. The number one problem in our world is alienation, rich versus poor, black versus white, labor versus management, conservative versus liberal, East versus West ... But Christ came to bring about reconciliation and peace.

Billy Graham

#81. Innately, the Old Soul carries a sense of world-wariness as he stands on the outside, looking in. As an observer, the Old Soul like the Steppenwolf, feels an all-pervading sense of alienation. He is the ultimate Outsider who is both in the world, but not quite of the world at the same time.

Aletheia Luna

#82. People change with time. There are things that happened to a person in his childhood and years later they seem to him alien and strange. I am trying to decipher that child. Sometimes he is a stranger to me. When you think about when you were 14, don't you feel a certain alienation?

Gunter Grass

#83. All art stems from a place of alienation. Intimate and alone. Most people are oppressed by the opinion of others, but I was not that way. I was afraid of the repercussions of not doing what I was told to do, what I was called to do by a creator.

CeeLo Green

#84. When we lack etiquette, we trash things. We trash each other. We trash the environment. We lose sight of the value of things. We suffer alienation when our spirit is disconnected from our physical awareness.

Frederick Lenz

#85. It would seem, then, to be the part of political wisdom to found government on property; and to establish such distribution of property, by the laws which regulate its transmission and alienation, as to interest the great majority of society in the protection of the government.

Daniel Webster

#86. A man with an affectionate disposition, who finds a wife to concur with his fundamental idea of life, easily comes to persuade himself that no other woman would have suited him so well, and does a little daily snapping and quarreling without any sense of alienation.

George Eliot

#87. The Faith does not mean an alienation from any culture for any people because all cultures await Christ and are not destroyed by the Lord. In fact, they reach their maturity.

Pope Benedict XVI

#88. Any rainy summer morning, of course, has the seeds of gloomy alienation sown in. But a rainy summer morning far from home - when your personal clouds don't move but hang - can easily produce the feeling of the world as seen from the grave. This I know.

Richard Ford

#89. I've got four lovely children, ten lovely grandchildren, and I left parliament to devote more time to politics, and I think that what is really going on in Britain is a growing sense of alienation. People don't feel anyone listens to them.

Tony Benn

#90. The opposite of simplicity is not complexity, but fragmentation and alienation.

Mark Sheppard

#91. In the development of both capitalism and communism, as we visualize them in the next fifty or a hundred years, the processes that encourage human alienation will continue.

Erich Fromm

#92. Revelation is purposive. Its end is not simply divine self-display, but the overcoming of human opposition, alienation and pride, and their replacement by knowledge, love and fear of God. In short: revelation is reconciliation.

John B. Webster

#93. Young alienation, disappointment and heartache is all a part of the first real growing up that we do.

Judd Nelson

#94. I would like to devote myself to the cause of parental alienation.

Alec Baldwin

#95. In our desire to impose form on the world and our lives we have lost the capacity to see the form that is already there; and in that lies not liberation but alienation, the cutting off from things as they really are.

Colin Gunton

#96. Being gay immediately placed me outside the values of the society I was growing up in. Apartheid was a very patriarchal system, so its assumptions seemed foreign to me from the outset. I've always had the advantage of alienation.

Damon Galgut

#97. Religious communities have historically been designed to counteract the forces of alienation. That's why so many successful social movements have relied upon the strength of spiritual communities and a large base of their organizing has been through them.

Tim DeChristopher

#98. The alienation of man thus appeared as the fundamental evil of capitalist society.

Karl Marx

#99. Voice comes from a moment beyond the alienation of culture, it is heard before there is an "I" to listen to it.

Betsy Wing

#100. When power is exercised exclusively at the centre, the result is rigidity of rules and alienation of the people subject to those rules.

Charles Kennedy