Suffering is not necessarily a fixed and universal experience that can be measured by a single rod: it is related to situations, needs, and aspiratio… - Benjamin Barber

Not only psychiatry itself but also the values reflected in its statistical definition of “normalcy” serve to condition men to habitual, unthinking, conformist behavior.

I don't divide the world into the weak and the strong, or the successes and the failures, those who make it or those who don't. I divide the world into learners and nonlearners.

The American political system is a remarkable example of the coexistence — sometimes harmonious, more often uncomfortable — of all three dispositions. Americans, we might say, are anarchists in their values (privacy, liberty, individualism, property, and rights); realists in their means (power, law, coercive mediation, and sovereign adjudication); and minimalists in their political temper (tolerance wariness of government, pluralism, and such institutionalizations of caution as the separation of powers and judicial review.