“When people feel their insignificance as individual persons, they also suffer an undermining of their sense of human responsibility.”

When I fall in love, I feel more valuable and I treat myself with more care. We have all observed the hesitant adolescent, uncertain of himself, who, when he or she falls in love, suddenly walks with a certain inner assuredness and confidence/

However it may be confounded or covered up or counterfeited, this elemental capacity to fight against injustice remains the distinguishing characteristic of human beings.

One of the few blessings of living in an age of anxiety is that we are forced to become aware of ourselves.

The one thing we can be certain of is that if we let ourselves fully into the relationship for good or evil, we will not come out unaffected.

People attain worth and dignity by the multitude of decisions they make from day by day. These decisions require courage.

Deeds of violence in our society are performed largely by those trying to establish their self-esteem, to defend their self-image, and to demonstrate that they, too, are significant.

Violence arises not out of superfluity of power but out of powerlessness.

Real freedom is the ability to pause between stimulus and response, and in that pause, choose.

Suffering is nature’s way of indicating a mistaken attitude or way of behavior, and to the nonegocentric person every moment of suffering is the opportunity for growth. People should rejoice in suffering, strange as it sounds, for this is a sign of the availability of energy to transform their characters.

Freedom is man’s capacity to take a hand in his own development. It is our capacity to mold ourselves.

We define religion as the assumption that life has meaning. Religion, or lack of it, is shown not in some intellectual or verbal formulations but in one’s total orientation to life.

This is what makes heroism so important: it reflects our own sense of identity and from this our own heroism is molded.

The essence of being human is that, in the brief moment we exist on this spinning planet, we can love some persons and some things, in spite of the fact that time and death will ultimately claim us all.

Communication leads to community, that is, to understanding, intimacy and mutual valuing.

A person can meet anxiety to the extent that his values are stronger than the threat.

Mass communication–wonder as it may be technologically and something to be appreciated and valued–presents us wit a serious daner, the danger of conformism, due to the fact that we all view the same things at the same time in all the cities of the country. (p. 73)