Alienation Quotes

Part of the gestation of ‘The Wall’ was this business of alienation from the audience, and so the interesting thing was, what ‘The Wall’ eventually became was something that absolutely engaged the audience.

I think the degree of alienation and despair is more universal.

Anytime you’re telling a story about monsterhood, you’re playing around with ideas about otherness and alienation.

‘The Simpsons’ is about alienation and the ambivalence of living with a family who you love but who drive you completely crazy.

By some estimates, 80% of rap music is bought by white youth. And this makes for another irony. The blooming of white alienation has brought us the first generation of black entrepreneurs with wide-open access to the American mainstream.

People talk about alienation in the city. Diners are a place where you feel comfortable, an extension of your house.

What’s wrong with us isn’t a rap sheet of bad deeds, but a damaged heart, a soul-sickness, that plunges us into fearful self-protection, alienation from God and others.

I think we suffer from certain alienation. We live on this planet, but we somehow have an idea that we’re elevated from it, that we’re not nature. We’re a creature that manages nature and is superior and does whatever it wants. That creates a separation between humanity and the rest of the planet.

I was only listening to rock music, burning joss sticks in my bedroom, wanting only to be a disc jockey, and watching six hours of television a night – the worst kind of teenage alienation.

Another cause for the increase in alienation and cynicism is a feeling that too many policy decisions that affect individuals have been taken out of any system that has accountability or that they can influence.

I always think that ‘Sound of My Voice’ is a movie about the crumbs in ‘Hansel and Gretel.’ You know, those crumbs. It’s about finding your way out of the claustrophobia and alienation of modern life.

Songs don’t have to be about going out on Saturday night and having a good rink-up and driving home and crashing cars. A lot of what I’ve done is about alienation… about where you fit in society.

We live in a time where there’s an alienation factor. There’s a certain disconnection. We don’t have any real sense of community anymore.

I haven’t reported in grand detail on rituals of American life, road journeys or malls or the death of steel-manufacturing towns. I think this is because I feel a degree of alienation that I cannot combat.

Sociologists well understand that chaos at home causes violent behavior, educational failure and social alienation among children. Yet, many of us in America stay far, far away from this topic. That in itself is a national scandal. Bad parenting is gravely harming this nation.

Many Palestinians have been living for decades in camps, disconnected from the environment in which they grew up, wallowing in poverty, in neglect, alienation, bitterness, and a deep, unrelenting sense of humiliation.

I certainly feel sad about the alienation from my son.

In Minneapolis, we believe in connection, not alienation. We believe in compassion, not indifference. We believe in love, but we are not timid.

I have been driven to the edge by parental alienation for many years now. You have to go through this to understand.

I’m the classic example of alienation: I grew up in a middle-class household without art or books. I was going to be a chemical engineer until I went to the theatre for the first time at 16 and was blown away by it.

I remembered what it was like: the weirdness, being the odd man out, trying to make my way around campus, and trying to figure out who my friends would be, who to steer clear of. I wrote it all down in a fanciful way – the feelings of alienation, the feelings of uncertainty, of being away from home for the first time.

When I go back to America, after a few days I am once again filled with this kind of angry alienation and disgust with this thing there that America has got – you have no idea how pervasive it is there. The public relations and propaganda put out by the corporate mono-culture there is so pervasive.

Family traditions counter alienation and confusion. They help us define who we are; they provide something steady, reliable and safe in a confusing world.

We have witnessed the terrible increases in the incidence of alcoholism, the advent of drug dependency, the protests, marches, strikes and human alienation.

When you stop to think about it, so many films today where we don’t have that kind of contact are films about alienation. About alienated feelings. We are much more alienated from our colleagues nowadays.

While the West tries to turn its civilization into cultural variety hour, Islam tries to turn Muslim lands into a cultural monolith. The same West that justifies the rap culture thinks that every Muslim terrorist bombing is an expression of economic angst or social alienation.

I’m very concerned about the tone of politics in recent years. We’ve seen a decline in civility and bipartisanship, and a rapid increase in hostility between those who have differing opinions. I think this has led to the alienation of the public in governance, which jeopardizes democratic participation.

I’ve got four lovely children, ten lovely grandchildren, and I left parliament to devote more time to politics, and I think that what is really going on in Britain is a growing sense of alienation. People don’t feel anyone listens to them.

Slowly but surely, I went through different phases of fame, and each rises you further into isolation and alienation.

For me, heaven would be a lack of alienation. The whole time I was growing up, I felt comfort was inherently evil. I think that, for me, heaven isn’t about couches and milk shakes and never having a troubling thought again.

Black people should have recognition for themselves and their backgrounds and their relationships with other people in the world and thus lose some of their alienation. This museum has certainly stood for that in this town.

Disconnection or alienation from the past has political consequences.

In cities, people go to work and all walk there together, like some arterial flow. And there’s a certain desolation about it, an alienation that we all experience.

At a moment when people are losing faith in their ability to participate in politics and make themselves heard, the media can play a critical role in reversing that sense of alienation.

I used to think that the feeling of alienation that I would have was just me, but I realise that it’s also a symptom of the modern world.

People change with time. There are things that happened to a person in his childhood and years later they seem to him alien and strange. I am trying to decipher that child. Sometimes he is a stranger to me. When you think about when you were 14, don’t you feel a certain alienation?

What’s incredible with Trent Reznor is how he took all the alienation and the rejection of traditional rock and found a way to encapsulate it in a form that made the public finally get industrial music.

Being gay immediately placed me outside the values of the society I was growing up in. Apartheid was a very patriarchal system, so its assumptions seemed foreign to me from the outset. I’ve always had the advantage of alienation.

The historical experience of socialist countries has sadly demonstrated that collectivism does not do away with alienation but rather increases it, adding to it a lack of basic necessities and economic inefficiency.

Back when I was in college, people used to talk about the alienation of the artist, not ever quite fitting in any place.