“...what the social environment told them to want...”

“The essence of socialization is to make people dependent on social controls, to have them respond predictably to rewards and punishments.”

“...they make us dependent on a social system that exploits our energies for its own purposes. ...If a person learns to enjoy and find meaning in the ongoing stream of experience, in the process of living itself, the burden of social controls automatically falls from one's shoulders.”

“The last great attempt to free consciousness from the domination of impulses and social controls was psychoanalysis; as Freud pointed out, the two tyrants that fought for control over the mind were the id and the superago, the first a servant of a genes, the second a lackey of society - both representing the "Other".”

“But religions are only temporarily successful attempts to cope with the lack of meaning in life; they are not permanent answers.”

“We are always getting to live, as Ralph Waldo Emerson used to say, but never living. Or as poor Frances learned in the children's story, it is always bread and jam tomorrow, never brad and jam today.”

“Pain and pleasure occur in consciousness and exist only there”