Society has lost its memory, and with it, its mind. The inability or refusal to think back takes its toll in the inability to think. - Russell Jacoby

The laws of social development are not identical with the laws in the natural sciences. The content of the social laws is not nature but second nature: coagulated history. They are manmade, but they also make men; they are dialectical, at once subject and object.

The individual, before it can determine itself, is determined by the relations in which it is enmeshed. “It is a fellow-being before it is a being.”

Though the ancient world understood that work was a curse, modern industrial society spreads its gospel. The working class, Lafargue hopelessly hoped, must reject the work fetish.