21 quotes
We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love.
The Politics of Experience (1967)
Psychology is the logos of experience. Psychology is the structure of the evidence, and hence psychology is the science of sciences.
The Politics of Experience (1967)
We can see other people's behaviour, but not their experience.
The Politics of Experience (1967)
Alienation as our present destiny is achieved only by outrageous violence perpetrated by human beings on human beings.
The Politics of Experience (1967)
There is no such "condition" as "schizophrenia," but the label is a social fact and the social fact a political event.
The Politics of Experience (1967)
Experience used to be called The Soul. Experience as invisibility of man to man is at the same time more evident than anything.
The Politics of Experience (1967)
These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potentialities, and on the whole this enterprise is successful.
The Politics of Experience (1967)
Social phenomenology is the science of my own and of others' experience.
The Politics of Experience (1967)
Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.
The Politics of Experience (1967)
Even facts become fictions without adequate ways of seeing "the facts". We do not need theories so much as the experience that is the source of the theory.
The Politics of Experience (1967)
The other person's behaviour is an experience of mine. My behaviour is an experience of the other.
The Politics of Experience (1967)
I cannot experience your experience. You cannot experience my experience. We are both invisible men.
The Politics of Experience (1967)
It is of fundamental importance not to make the positivist mistake of assuming that because a group’s members are in formation this means that they’re necessarily on course.
The Politics of Experience (1967)
Few books today are forgivable.
The Politics of Experience (1967)
We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing.
The Politics of Experience (1967)
Long before a thermonuclear war can come about, we have had to lay waste our own sanity. We begin with the children. It is imperative to catch them in time. Without the most thorough and rapid brainwashing their dirty minds would see through our dirty tricks.
The Politics of Experience (1967)
What is to be done? We who are still half alive, living in the often fibrillating heartland of a senescent capitalism — can we do more than reflect the decay around and within us? Can we do more than sing our sad and bitter songs of disillusion and defeat?
The Politics of Experience (1967)
We are all murderers and prostitutes — no matter to what culture, society, class, nation, we belong, no matter how normal, moral, or mature we take ourselves to be.
Humanity is estranged from its authentic possibilities.
The Politics of Experience (1967)
I see you, and you see me. I experience you, and you experience me. I see your behaviour. You see my behaviour. But I do not and never have and never will see your experience of me. Just as you cannot "see" my experience of you.
The Politics of Experience (1967)
A child born today in the United Kingdom stands a ten times greater chance of being admitted to a mental hospital than to a university … This can be taken as an indication that we are driving our children mad more effectively than we are genuinely educating them. Perhaps it is our way of educating them that is driving them mad.
The Politics of Experience (1967)