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Adventure
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I am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador
-Sigmund Freud, letter, The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess 1887-1904 (1985), February 1, 1900
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America
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America is a mistake, a giant mistake.
-Sigmund Freud
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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.
-Sigmund Freud
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Anger
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The tendency of aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual disposition in man... it constitutes the most powerful obstacle to culture.
-Sigmund Freud
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Authors & Writing
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Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.
-Sigmund Freud
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Baby, Babies
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No one who has seen a baby sinking back satiated from the breast and falling asleep with flushed cheeks and a blissful smile can escape the reflection that this picture persists as a prototype of the expression of sexual satisfaction in later life.
-Sigmund Freud
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Belief
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Devout believers are safeguarded in a high degree against the risk of certain neurotic illnesses; their acceptance of the universal neurosis spares them the task of constructing a personal one.
-Sigmund Freud
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Birth
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The act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety.
-Sigmund Freud
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It would be one of the greatest triumphs of humanity, one of the most tangible liberations from the constraints of nature to which mankind is subject, if we could succeed in raising the responsible act of procreating children to the level of a deliberate and intentional activity and in freeing it from its entanglement with the necessary satisfaction of a natural need.
-Sigmund Freud
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Censorship
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What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.
-Sigmund Freud, Referring to the public burning of his books in Berlin. Letter to Ernest Jones (1933)
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Children
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We know less about the sexual life of little girls than of boys. But we need not feel ashamed of this distinction; after all, the sexual life of adult women is a dark continent for psychology.
-Sigmund Freud
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Children are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them.
-Sigmund Freud
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Civilization
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Civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind. Why this has to happen, we do not know; the work of Eros is precisely this.
-Sigmund Freud
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Communism
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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.
-Sigmund Freud
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Conscience
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Conscience is the internal perception of the rejection of a particular wish operating within us.
-Sigmund Freud
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Decisions
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When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons. In vital matters, however, such as the choice of a mate or a profession, the decision should come from the unconscious, from somewhere within ourselves. In the important decisions of personal life, we should be governed, I think, by the deep inner needs of our nature.
-Sigmund Freud
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Discovery
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Look into the depths of your own soul and learn first to know yourself, then you will understand why this illness was bound to come upon you and perhaps you will thenceforth avoid falling ill.
-Sigmund Freud
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Dissent
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Opposition is not necessarily enmity; it is merely misused and made an occasion for enmity.
-Sigmund Freud
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Doctors
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The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.
-Sigmund Freud
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Drugs
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Woe to you, my Princess, when I come... you shall see who is the stronger, a gentle little girl who doesn't eat enough or a big wild man who has cocaine in his body.
-Sigmund Freud
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Family
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If a man has been his mother's undisputed darling he retains throughout life the triumphant feeling, the confidence in success, which not seldom brings actual success along with it.
-Sigmund Freud
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Fate & Destiny
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Anatomy is destiny.
-Sigmund Freud
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Father
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I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection.
-Sigmund Freud
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Flowers
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Flowers are restful to look at. They have neither emotions nor conflicts.
-Sigmund Freud
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God
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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.
-Sigmund Freud
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Books by and about Sigmund Freud