Needs are not fixed data but can be created, cultivated, and – though this is much more difficult – diminished and even eliminated.1
Such an incredibly rarely recognized fact about humans. You meet in America perhaps one in a hundred thousand who has ever decided to rid himself of a need. Yet it is this sort of psychological sculpting of oneself that seems most essential to all development.
- Walter Kaufmann : Without Guilt And Justice : An Attack On Distributive Justice↩