Sigmund Freud

The psychoanalysis of individual human beings, however, teaches us with quite special insistence that the god of each of them is formed in the likeness of his father, that his personal relation to God depends on his relation to his father in the flesh and oscillates and changes along with that relation, and that at bottom God is nothing other than an exalted father.

Where id was, there ego shall be.

Sadism is all right in its place, but it should be directed to proper ends.

Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another.

Like the physical, the psychical is not necessarily in reality what it appears to us to be.

Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me.

Men are strong so long as they represent a strong idea they become powerless when they oppose it.

We are never so defensless against suffering as when we love.

We have long observed that every neurosis has the result, and therefore probably the purpose, of forcing the patient out of real life, of alienating him from actuality.

What we call happiness in the strictest sense comes from the (preferably sudden) satisfaction of needs which have been dammed up to a high degree.

Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy.

If you can't do it, give up

Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.

Men are more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine.

A certain degree of neurosis is of inestimable value as a drive, especially to a psychologist.

I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection.

Time spent with cats is never wasted.

Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs, he is truly magnificent but those organs have not grown on him and they still give him much trouble at times.

A belligerent state permits itself every such misdeed, every such act of violence, as would disgrace the individual.

Psychoanalysis is for hysterical pathological cases, not for silly rich American women who should be learning how to darn socks

And now look at the great war still devastating Europe think of the colossal brutality, cruelty, and mendacity which is now allowed to spread itself over the civilized world. Do you really believe that a handful of unprincipled placeaahunters and corrupters of men would have succeeded in letting loose all this latent evil, if the millions of their followers were not also guilty

We must not allow ourselves to be deflected by the feminists who are anxious to force us to regard the two sexes as completely equal in position and worth

This is one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever

I do not think our successes can compete with those of Lourdes. There are so many more people who believe in the miracles of the Blessed Virgin than in the existence of the unconscious.

People are made either to sufffer or to destroy.