As I’ve said before, no wonder we think God has abandoned us; we’ve abandoned ourselves.

That's the trouble with the world. We all despise ourselves.

We all live under the constant threat of our own annihilation. Only by the most outrageous violation of ourselves have we achieved our capacity to live in relative adjustment to a civilization apparently driven to its own destruction.

we are abandoned in the world ... in the sense that we find ourselves suddenly alone and without help. Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.

We are our own devils; we drive ourselves out of our Edens.

We live in an atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of everything that is real about us; ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinions, of our experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins.

As a species, we were an abomination. All of us.

We are all so guilty at the way we have allowed the world around us to become more ugly and tasteless every year that we surrender to terror and steep ourselves in it.

We are in danger of destroying ourselves by our greed and stupidity. We cannot remain looking inwards at ourselves on a small and increasingly polluted and overcrowded planet.

I am abandoned in the world... in the sense that I find myself suddenly alone and without help, engaged in a world for which I bear the whole responsibility without being able, no matter what I do, to tear myself away from this responsibility for an instant.

Today's today. Tomorrow, we may be
Ourselves gone down the drain of eternity.

We are difficult to come by and a danger to ourselves.

We have fallen out of belonging.

Were we to undertake an exhaustive self-scrutiny, disgust would paralyze us, we would be doomed to a thankless existence.