Escape From Freedom Quotes
"Man has a horror for aloneness. And of all kinds of aloneness, moral aloneness is the most terrible."
"Freedom, though it has brought him independence and rationality, has made him isolated and, thereby, anxious and powerless."
"Man is born without the equipment for appropriate action which the animal possesses; his adaptation to nature is based essentially on the process of learning, not on instinctual determination."
"Material riches are necessary; they have secondary importance, since without them men cannot support themselves and help one another."
"The first thought of man, be he a leper or a prisoner, a sinner or an invalid, is: to have a companion of his fate."
"There is no place in medieval theory for economic activity which is not related to a moral end."
"The individual was absorbed by a passionate egocentricity, an insatiable greed for power and wealth."
"The serious threat to our democracy is not the existence of foreign totalitarian states. It is the existence within our own personal attitudes and within our own institutions."
"This isolation is unbearable and the alternatives he is confronted with are either to escape from the burden of his freedom into new dependencies and submission, or to advance to the full realization of positive freedom which is based upon the uniqueness and individuality of man."
"The most important event in this respect is the discovery of atomic energy, and its possible use as a weapon of destruction."
"The vast majority were Hoerige, a class personally free but whose land was subject to dues, the individuals being liable to services according to agreement."
"Minutes became valuable; a symptom of this new sense of time is the fact that in Nürnberg the clocks have been striking the quarter hours since the sixteenth century."
"Work became increasingly a supreme value. A new attitude toward work developed and was so strong that the middle class grew indignant against the economic unproductivity of the institutions of the Church."
"The idea of efficiency assumed the role of one of the highest moral virtues."
"The medieval social system was destroyed and with it the stability and relative security it had offered the individual."
"The individual was left alone; everything depended on his own effort, not on the security of his traditional status."
"Capital 'had ceased to be a servant and had become a master.'"
"The market day became the day of judgment for the products of human effort."
"Each individual must go ahead and try his luck. He had to swim or to sink."
"All the decisive elements of modern capitalism had already by that time come into existence, together with their psychological effect upon the individual."
"The work of his own hands has become his God."
"Modern man’s feeling of isolation and powerlessness is increased still further by the character which all his human relationships have assumed."
"Not only the economic, but also the personal relations between men have this character of alienation."
"Man does not only sell commodities, he sells himself and feels himself to be a commodity."
"The individual became more alone, isolated, became an instrument in the hands of overwhelmingly strong forces outside of himself."
"The admiration by others and the power over them, added to the support which property gave, backed up the insecure individual self."
"The relationship between employer and employee is permeated by the same spirit of indifference."
"The customer is an object to be manipulated, not a concrete person whose aims the businessman is interested to satisfy."
"A vast sector of modern advertising is different; it does not appeal to reason but to emotion."
"The consumer movement has attempted to restore the customer’s critical ability, dignity, and sense of significance."
"The voter is confronted by mammoth parties which are just as distant and as impressive as the mammoth organizations of industry."
"The psychological effect of the vastness and superior power of big enterprise has also its effect on the worker."
"The insignificance of the individual in our era concerns not only his role as a businessman, employee, or manual laborer, but also his role as a customer."
"All he can do is to fall in step like a marching soldier or a worker on the endless belt."
"They cannot go on bearing the burden of "freedom from"; they must try to escape from freedom altogether unless they can progress from negative to positive freedom."
"The mass meeting is necessary if only for the reason that in it the individual, who is becoming an adherent of a new movement feels lonely and is easily seized with the fear of being alone, receives for the first time the pictures of a greater community."
"We turn to the great army of those who are so poor that their personal lives could not mean the highest fortune of the world."
"In the folkish State the folkish view of life has finally to succeed in bringing about that nobler era when men see their care no longer in the better breeding of dogs, horses and cats, but rather in the uplifting of mankind itself."
"To be a socialist is to submit the I to the thou; socialism is sacrificing the individual to the whole."
"Idealism alone leads men to voluntary acknowledgment of the privilege of force and strength and thus makes them become a dust particle of that order which forms and shapes the entire universe."
"What Germany was lacking was a close co-operation of brutal power and ingenious political intention."
"In the hunt for their own happiness, people fall all the more out of heaven into hell."
"We want to know whether these men have the will to lead, to be masters, in one word, to rule… We want to rule and enjoy it."
"Heaven is superior to people, for luckily one can fool people but Heaven could not be bribed."
"The individual should accept this personal insignificance, dissolve himself in a higher power, and then feel proud in participating in the strength and glory of this higher power."
"The power which impresses Hitler probably more than God, Providence, and Fate, is Nature."
"Man does not dominate Nature, but... he has risen to the position of master of those other living beings lacking this knowledge."
"The craving for power over men and the longing for submission to an overwhelmingly strong outside power."
"The authoritarian systems cannot do away with the basic conditions that make for the quest for freedom."
"The modern industrial system has virtually a capacity to produce... the full expression of man’s intellectual, sensuous, and emotional potentialities."
"Freedom from external authority is a lasting gain only if the inner psychological conditions are such that we are able to establish our own individuality."
"The right to express our thoughts means something only if we are able to have thoughts of our own."
"Man cannot endure this negative freedom; that he tries to escape into new bondage which is to be a substitute for the primary bonds which he has given up."
"The escape into symbiosis can alleviate the suffering for a time but it does not eliminate it."
"The authoritarian ideology and practice satisfies the desires springing from the character structure of one part of the population."
"The function of an authoritarian ideology and practice can be compared to the function of neurotic symptoms."
"The authoritarian systems... neither can they exterminate the quest for freedom that springs from these conditions."
"The primitive level of human existence is that of want."
"Culture develop[s] and with it those strivings that attend the phenomena of abundance."
"Sexual pleasure as spontaneous joy—the essence of which is not negative relief from tension—had no place in his psychology."
"Ideologies and culture in general are rooted in the social character."
"Economic, psychological, and ideological forces operate in this way: that man reacts to changing external situations by changes in himself."
"Ideas are effective, but they must be understood as being rooted in the whole of the character structure of members of a social group."
"Changing social conditions result in changes of the social character."
"Social conditions influence ideological phenomena through the medium of character."
"They are the expression of human needs which, although they can be molded, cannot be uprooted."