The bourgeois man is first and foremost fashioned and turned into a machine. He is happy even if he has become only a number in a political sum, and he can be called in every respect perfect if he has transformed himself from a person into a cipher. As it is with the individual, so with the masses. They eat, marry, produce children, become old, and so on to infinity. Pure life simply for the sake of life is the source of baseness, and everything is base that has nothing of the world-spirit of philosophy and poetry.

Autor: Friedrich Schlegel