Date: 1947, 1958

"Religion, ethics, metaphysics – these are merely the 'spiritual' and 'inner' festivals of human anguish, ways of channelling the black waters of anxiety – and towards what abyss?"

— Lefebvre, Henri (1901-1991)

Date: 1949

"Or, to use another simile, mental processes are 'overheard' by the mind whose processes they are, somewhat as a speaker overhears the words he is himself uttering."

— Ryle, Gilbert (1900-1976)

Date: March 17, 1950 [2005]

"One of those involuntary revealing thoughts one surprises, running like a rat through the muck-heap of my mind: Maybe I'll be able to afford that ikon if he goes."

— Friend, Donald (1915-1989)

Date: 1952

La structure néurotique d'un individu sear justement l'élaboration, la formation, l'éclosion dans le moi de noeuds conflictuels provenant d'une part du milieu, d'autre part de la façon toute personelle dont cet individu réagit à ces influences [The neurotic structure of an individual is precisely...

— Fanon, Frantz (1925-1961)

Date: 1960

"Physical things generally, however remote, become known to us only through the effects which they help induce at our sensory surfaces."

— Quine, W. V. O. (1908-2000)

Date: July, 1962; November 22, 1962; 1973

"Memory is, really, in itself, a tool, one of the many tools that an artist uses; and some recollections, perhaps intellectual rather than emotional, are very brittle and sometimes apt to lose the flavor of reality when they are immersed by the novelist in his book, when they are given away to ch...

— Nabokov, Vladimir (1899-1977)

Date: August, 1963

"But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize, and even kill your black brothers and sisters with impunity; when you see the vast majority of your twenty mill...

— King, Martin Luther [Michael] (1929-1968)

Date: 1964

"Its productivity and efficiency, its capacity to increase and spread comforts, to turn waste into need, and destruction into construction, the extent to which this civilization transforms the object world into an extension of man's mind and body makes the very notion of alienation questionable. ...

— Marcuse, Herbert (1898-1979)

Date: 1978, 1979

"The mind is like the untrained elephant. When it is bound with the cord of mindfulness to the firm post of the previously discussed meditative object, [even] if it is unwilling to remain there, it is gradually brought under control, goaded by the hook of awareness."

— Wayman, Alex

Date: June 16, 1978

"The human head is bigger than the globe."

— Grass, Günther (b. 1927)