Quotations by Author
Sigmund Freud
I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection.
What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.
Children are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them.
Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock.
It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct.
Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility
The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing.
What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.
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.
Our knowledge of the historical worth of certain religious doctrines increases our respect for them, but does not invalidate our proposal that they should cease to be put forward as the reasons for the precepts of civilization. On the contrary! Those historical residues have helped us to view religious teachings, as it were, as neurotic relics, and we may now argue that the time has probably come, as it does in an analytic treatment, for replacing the effects of repression by the results of the rational operation of the intellect.
The rest of our enquiry is made easy because this God-Creator is openly called Father. Psycho-analysis concludes that he really is the father, clothed in the grandeur in which he once appeared to the small child.
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.