Simone de Beauvoir

“Indicating the human wastage incurred by capitalism, Beauvoir argues that ‘society cares about the individual only insofar as he is profitable.’ This is a moral indictment of society – ‘old age exposes the failure of our entire civilization’ – and she advocates a radical transformation of the conditions of life to remedy the alienation experienced by young and old alike.”

Mere Christianity

“It is quite true that if we took Christ’s advice we should soon be living in a happier world. You need not even go as far as Christ. If we did all that Plato or Aristotle or Confucius told us, we should get on a great deal better than we do. And so what? We never have followed the advice of the great teachers. Why are we likely to begin now? Why are we more likely to follow Christ than any of the others? Because He is the best moral teacher? But that makes it even less likely that we shall follow Him. If we cannot take the elementary lessons, is it likely we are going to take the most advanced one? If Christianity only means one more bit of good advice, then Christianity is of no importance. There has been no lack of good advice for the last four thousand years. A bit more makes no difference.”

Mere Christianity

“When a man is getting better, he understands more and more clearly the evil that is still left in him. When a man is getting worse, he understands his own badness less and less. A moderately bad man knows he is not very good: a thoroughly bad man thinks he is all right. This is common sense, really. You understand sleep when you are awake, not while you are sleeping. You can see mistakes in arithmetic when your mind is working properly: while you are making them you cannot see them. You can understand the nature of drunkenness when you are sober, not when you are drunk. Good people know about both good and evil: bad people do not know about either.”

Mere Christianity

“When a man who has been perverted from his youth and taught that cruelty is the right thing, does some tiny little kindness, or refrains from some cruelty he might have committed, and thereby, perhaps, risks being sneered at by his companions, he may, in God’s eyes, be doing more than you and I would do if we gave up life itself for a friend. It is as well to put this the other way round. Some of us who seem quite nice people may, in fact, have made so little use of a good heredity and a good upbringing that we are really worse than those whom we regard as fiends. Can we be quite certain how we should have behaved if we had been saddled with the psychological outfit, and then with the bad upbringing, and then with the power, say, of Himmler?”

Mere Christianity

“What is the good of drawing up, on paper, rules for social behaviour, if we know that, in fact, our greed, cowardice, ill temper, and self-conceit are going to prevent us from keeping them? I do not mean for a moment that we ought not to think, and think hard about improvements in our social and economic system. What I do mean is that all that thinking will be mere moonshine unless we realize that nothing but the courage and unselfishness of individuals is ever going to make any system work properly. It is easy enough to remove the particular kinds of graft or bullying that go on under the present system: but as long as men are twisters or bullies they will find some new way of carrying on the old game under the new system. You cannot make men good by law: and without good men you cannot have a good society.”

Mere Christianity

“Strictly speaking, there are no such things as good and bad impulses. Think once again of a piano. It has not got two kinds of notes on it, the ‘right’ notes and the ‘wrong’ ones. Every single note is right at one time and wrong at another. The Moral Law is not any one instinct or any set of instincts: it is something which makes a kind of tune (the tune we call goodness or right conduct) by directing the instincts.”

Mere Christianity

“That time you were so unfair to the children was when you were very tired. That slightly shady business about the money – the one you have almost forgotten – came when you were very hard up. And what you promised to do for old so-and-so and have never done – well, you never would have promised if you had known how frightfully busy you were going to be. And as for your behaviour to your wife (or husband) or sister (or brother) if I knew how irritating they could be, I would not wonder at it – and who the dickens am I, anyway? I am just the same. That is to say, I do not succeed in keeping the Law of Nature very well, and the moment anyone tells me I am not keeping it, there starts up in my mind a string of excuses as long as your arm. The question at the moment is not whether they are good excuses. THe point is that they are one more proof of how deeply, whether we like it or not, we believe in the Law of Nature. If we do not believe in decent behaviour, why should be so anxious to make excuses for not having behaved decently? The truth is, we believe in decency so much – we feel the Rule of Law pressing on us so – that we cannot bear to face the fact that we are breaking it, and consequently we try to shift the responsibility. For you notice that it is only for our bad behaviour that we find all these explanations. It is only our bad temper that we put down to being tired or worried or hungry; we put our good temper down to ourselves.”

The Brothers Karamazov

“In my view it is not necessary to destroy anything, all that need be destroyed in mankind is the idea of God, that is what one must proceed from! It is with that, with that one must begin – O, blind ones, who understand nothing! Once mankind, each and individually, has repudiated God (and I believe that that period, in a fashion parallel to the geological periods, will arrive), then of its own accord, and without the need of anthropophagy, the whole of the former world-outlook and, above all, the whole of the former morality, will collapse, and all will begin anew. People will unite together in order to take from life all that it is able to give, but only for the sake of happiness and joy inthis world. Man will exalt himself with a spirit of devine, titanic pride, and the man-god will appear. Vanquishing nature hour by hour, already without limits, by his will and science, man will thereby experience, hour by hour, a pleasure so elevated that it will replace all his former hopes of celestial pleasure. Every man will discover that he is wholly mortal, without the possibility of resurrection, and will accept death proudly and calmly, like a god. Out of pride he will grasp that there is no point in him complaining that life is a moment, and he will come to love his brother without any need of recompense. The love will only be sufficient for the moment of life, but the very consciousness of life’s momentariness will intensify its fire just as much as it formerly ran to fat in hopes of an infinite love beyond the grave.”

The Origins and History of Consciousness, pg 391

“When the individual falls away from the cultural fabric like this, he finds himself completely isolated in an egotistically infalted private world.  The restlessness, the discontents, the excesses, the formlessness and meaninglessness of a purely egocentric life – as compared with the symbolic life – are the unhappy results of this psychological apostasy.

“Following the collapse of the archeytpal canon, single archetypes then take possession of men and consume them like malenolent demons.  Typical and symptomatic of this transitional phenomenon is the state of affairs in America, through the same holds good for practically the whole Western hemisphere.  Every conceivable sort of dominant rules the personality, which is a personality only in name.  The grotesque fact that murderers, brigands, gangsters, thieves, forgers, tyrants, and swindelers, in a guise that deceives nobody, have seized control of collective life is characteristic of our time.  Their unscrupulousness and double-dealing are recognized – and admired.  Their ruthless energy they obtain at best from some stray achetypal content that has got them in its power.  The dynamism of a possessed personality is accordingly very great, because, in its one-track primitivity, it suffers from none of the differentiations that make men human.  Worship of the ‘beast’ is by no means confined to Germany; it prevails whereever one-sidedness, push, and moral blindness are appluaded, i.e., whereever the aggravating complexities of civilized behaior are swept away in favor of bestial rapactiy.  One has only to look at the educative ideals now current in the West.

“The possessed character of our financial and industrial magnates, for instance, is psychologically evident from the very fact that they are at the mercy of a suprapersonal factor – ‘work,’ ‘power,’ ‘money,’ or whatever they like to call it – which, in the telling phrase, ‘consumes’ them and leaves them little or no room as private persons.  Coupled with a nihilistic attitude towards civilization and humanity there goes a puffing up of the egosphere which expresses itself with brutish egotism in a total disregard for the common good and in the attempt to lead an egocentric existence, where personal power, money, and ‘experiences’ – unbelievably trivial, but plentiful – occupy every hour of the day.

“…Not only power, money, and lust, but religion, art, and politics are exclusive determinants in the form of parties, nations, sects, movements, and ‘isms’ of every description take possession of the masses and destroy the individual.  Far be it from us to compare the predatory industrial man and power politician with the man who is dedicated to an idea; for the latter is possessed by the archetypes that shape the future of mankind, and to this driving daemon he sacrifices his life.  Nevertheless, it is the task of a cultural psychology based on depth psychology to set forth a new ethos which shall take the collective effect of these daemonic possessions into account, and this means also accepting responsibility for them.”

In My Own Way

“The best Christian thought has always seen that only Pharisaism comes through trying to be good.  For sanctity is less in wanting to be moral than in loving God and other men.  But the moralism which condemns a man for not loving is simply adding strength to that sense of fear and insecurity which prevents him from loving.”