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“You can't go home again. Your childhood is lost. The friends of your youth are gone. Your present is slipping away from you. Nothing is ever the same.”
― The fragments of the work of Heraclitus of Ephesus on nature; translated from the Greek text of Bywater, with an introd. historical and critical
― The fragments of the work of Heraclitus of Ephesus on nature; translated from the Greek text of Bywater, with an introd. historical and critical
“A surrogate activity is an activity that is directed toward an artificial goal that the individual pursues for the sake of the “fulfillment” that he gets from pursuing the goal, not because he needs to attain the goal itself. For instance, there is no practical motive for building enormous muscles, hitting a little ball into a hole or acquiring a complete series of postage stamps. Yet many people in our society devote themselves with passion to bodybuilding, golf or stamp-collecting. Some people are more “other-directed” than others, and therefore will more readily attach importance to a surrogate activity simply because the people around them treat it as important or because society tells them it is important. That is why some people get very serious about essentially trivial activities such as sports, or bridge, or chess, or arcane scholarly pursuits, whereas others who are more clear-sighted never see these things as anything but the surrogate activities that they are, and consequently never attach enough importance to them to satisfy their need for the power process in that way.”
― Industrial Society and Its Future
― Industrial Society and Its Future
“Those who are most sensitive about "politically incorrect" terminology are not the average black ghetto-dweller, Asian immigrant, abused woman or disabled person, but a minority of activists, many of whom do not even belong to any "oppressed" group but come from privileged strata of society.”
― Industrial Society and Its Future
― Industrial Society and Its Future
“The concept of “mental health” in our society is defined largely by the extent to which an individual behaves in accord with the needs of the system and does so without showing signs of stress.”
― Industrial Society and Its Future
― Industrial Society and Its Future
“73. ...There is no law that says we have to go to work every day and follow our employer’s orders. Legally there is nothing to prevent us from going to live in the wild like primitive people or from going into business for ourselves. But in practice there is very little wild country left, and there is room in the economy for only a limited number of small business owners. Hence most of us can survive only as someone else’s employee.”
― Industrial Society and Its Future
― Industrial Society and Its Future
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