Sigmund Freud Quotes
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I have no concern with any economic criticisms of the communist system; I cannot inquire into whether the abolition of private property is expedient or advantageous. But I am able to recognize that the psychological premisses on which the system is based are an untenable illusion. In abolishing private property we deprive the human love of aggression of one of its instruments... but we have in no way altered the differences in power and influence which are misused by aggressiveness.
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We must reckon with the possibility that something in the nature of the sexual instinct itself is unfavorable to the realization of complete satisfaction.
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Whatever fosters the growth of civilization works at the same time against war.
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Religious ideas have sprung from the same need as all the other achievements of culture: from the necessity for defending itself against the crushing supremacy of nature.
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If it's not one thing, it's your mother.
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The intention that man should be happy is not in the plan of Creation.
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Conscience is the internal perception of the rejection of a particular wish operating within us.
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Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have, so to speak, pawned a part of their narcissism.
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Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.
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The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is 'What does a woman want?'
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Sexual morality - as society in its extreme form, the American, defines it - is contemptible. I advocate an incomparably freer sexual life.
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It almost looks like analysis were the third of those 'impossible' professions in which one can be quite sure of unsatisfying results. The other two, much older-established, are the bringing up of children and the government of nations.
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The Devil would be the best way out as an excuse for God; in that way he would be playing the same part as an agent of economic discharge as the Jew does in the world of the Aryan ideal. But even so, one can hold God responsible for the existence of the Devil just as well as for the existence of the wickedness which the Devil embodies.
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The pleasure of satisfying a savage instinct, undomesticated by the ego, is uncomparably much more intense than the one of satisfying a tamed instinct. The reason is becoming the enemy that prevents us from a lot of possibilities of pleasure.
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Much of our highly valued cultural heritage has been acquired at the cost of sexuality.
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America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success.
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Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces.
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We should picture the instrument that carries our mental functioning as resembling a compound microscope or photographic apparatus.
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In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.
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When we share - that is poetry in the prose of life.
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Dogs love their friends and bite their enemies, quite unlike people, who are incapable of pure love and always have to mix love and hate.
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Neither in my private life nor in my writings, have I ever made a secret of being an out-and-out unbeliever.
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A strong egoism is a protection.
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Opposition is not necessarily enmity; it is merely misused and made an occasion for enmity.