We are, all of us, creatures of habit, and when the seeeming necessity for schooling ourselves in new ways ceases to exist, we fall naturally and easily into the manner and customs which long usage has implanted ineradicably within us.

We have become so accustomed to our illusions that we mistake them for reality.

Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.

The problem is that we humans are deep conformists.

I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions.

A major fact of our present civilization is that more and more sin becomes collective, and the individual is forced to participate in collective sin.

The truth is that for nearly a half century we have witnessed a massive invasion by the sacred into our western world. Rational man has not been able to adhere to his rationality. In the end, the world is revealed to have a number of false bottoms. The more man penetrates into himself the more he is led to question the systematic certitudes so painfully acquired during the nineteenth century. We are detecting the remote depths which can no longer be concealed, and we have learned that our lucid intelligence rests on a base of mystery. We have seen reasonable man caught up in waves of mystic insanity and acting like a barbarian. We have witnessed the exasperated search for universal communions, from surrealism to jazz to eroticism. The fact is that man cannot live without participation in the sacred, and we are seeing his protest.

Once we allow ourselves to become disobedient to the test of an accountant's profit, we have begun to change our civilization.

The life we have left behind us has a bad habit of stepping out of the shadows, of bringing complaints against us, of taking us to court.

The main affliction of our modern civilization is that we don’t know how to handle the suffering inside us and we try to cover it up with all kinds of consumption.

We don’t choose our earliest habits, we imitate them.

But Humanity, in its desire for comfort, had over-reached itself. It had exploited the riches of nature too far. Quietly and complacently, it was sinking into decadence, and progress had come to mean the progress of the Machine.

The global triumph of Western values means we, as a species, have wandered into a state of prolonged neurosis because of the absence of a connection to the unconscious.

If our civilization is to survive, we must break with the habit of deference to great men.