Georg Simmel

Secrecy sets barriers between men, but at the same time offers the seductive temptation to break through the barriers by gossip or confession. ”

Secrecy involves a tension which, at the moment of revelation, finds its release. ”

The metropolis has always been the seat of the money economy. ”

Modern culture is constantly growing more objective. Its tissues grow more and more out of impersonal energies, and absorb less and less the subjective entirety of the individual. ”

The individual has become a mere cog in an enormous organization of things and powers which tear from his hands all progress, spirituality, and value in order to transform them from their subjective form into the form of a purely objective life. ”