Quotes to inspire and reflect

Even the most ardent environmentalist doesn’t really want to stop pollution. If he thinks about it, and doesn’t just talk about it, he wants to have the right amount of pollution. We can’t really afford to eliminate it—not without abandoning all the benefits of technology that we not only enjoy but on which we depend.

A society that puts equality—in the sense of equality of outcome—ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom.

Freedom in economic arrangements is itself a component of freedom broadly understood, so economic freedom is an end in itself. . . . Economic freedom is also an indispensable means toward the achievement of political freedom.

A minimum-wage law is, in reality, a law that makes it illegal for an employer to hire a person with limited skills.

Yes, America is gigantic, but a gigantic mistake.

Freud was once asked what he thought a normal person should be able to do well. The questioner probably expected a complicated answer. But Freud, in the curt way of his old days, is reported to have said: “Lieben und arbeiten” (to love and to work).

[ Remark on the occasion of his seventieth birthday :] The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious. . . . What I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied.

Judaism had been a religion of the father; Christianity became a religion of the son. The old God the Father fell back behind Christ; Christ, the Son, took his place, just as every son had hoped to do in primeval times.

Intolerance of groups is often, strangely enough, exhibited more strongly against small differences than against fundamental ones.

Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation; it cannot be classified as an illness; we consider it to be a variation of the sexual function, produced by a certain arrest of sexual development. . . . It is a great injustice to persecute homosexuality as a crime—and a cruelty, too.

Where id was, there ego shall be.

The poor ego . . . serves three severe masters and does what it can to bring their claims and demands into harmony with one another. . . . Its three tyrannical masters are the external world, the super-ego, and the id.

The ego’s relation to the id might be compared with that of a rider to his horse. The horse supplies the locomotive energy, while the rider has the privilege of deciding on the goal and of guiding the powerful animal’s movement. But only too often there arises between the ego and the id the not precisely ideal situation of the rider being obliged to guide the horse along the path by which it itself wants to go.

Before the problem of the artist, analysis must, alas, lay down its arms.

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.

The ego is not master in its own house.

At bottom God is nothing other than an exalted father.

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.

The individual’s mental development repeats the course of human development in an abbreviated form.

The excremental is all too intimately and inseparably bound up with the sexual; the position of the genitals— inter urinas et faeces —remains the decisive and unchangeable factor. One might say here, varying a well-known saying of the great Napoleon: “Anatomy is destiny.”

Being in love with the one parent and hating the other are among the essential constituents of the stock of psychical impulses which is formed at that time and which is of such importance in determining the symptoms of the later neurosis. . . . This discovery is confirmed by a legend that has come down to us from classical antiquity. . . . What I have in mind is the legend of King Oedipus.

I am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, nor an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador—an adventurer . . . with all the curiosity, daring, and tenacity characteristic of a man of this sort.

I am inclined to suppose that children cannot find their way to acts of sexual aggression unless they have been seduced previously. The foundation for a neurosis would accordingly always be laid in childhood by adults.

I owe my results to a new method of psychoanalysis, Josef Breuer’s exploratory procedure; it is a little intricate, but irreplaceable, so fertile has it shown itself to be in throwing light upon the obscure unconscious mental processes.

[ After the conclusion of the Constitutional Convention, when asked by a woman, “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” :] A republic, if you can keep it.

We have seen that hysterical symptoms immediately and permanently disappeared when we had succeeded in bringing clearly to light the memory of the event by which they were provoked and in arousing their accompanying affect, and when the patient had described that event in the greatest possible detail and had put the affect into words. . . . Hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences.

Our new Constitution is now established, and has an appearance that promises permanency; but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.

[ Responding to skepticism about the usefulness of the first balloon flights :] What good is a new-born baby?

Painters had found it difficult to distinguish in their art a rising from a setting sun. I have often and often in the course of the Session [ of the Constitutional Convention], and the vicissitudes of my hopes and fears as to its issue, looked at that [sun painted] behind the [chair of the] President without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting: but now at length I have the happiness to know that it is a rising and not a setting Sun.

The King of France’s Picture set with Four hundred and Eight Diamonds, I give to my Daughter Sarah Bache requesting however that she would not form any of those Diamonds into Ornaments either for herself or Daughters and thereby introduce or countenance the expensive vain and useless Fashion of wearing Jewels in this Country.

That it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer, is a Maxim that has been long and generally approved.

I wish the bald eagle had not been chosen as the representative of our country. . . . The turkey . . . is a much more respectable bird.

Old Boys have their Playthings as well as Young

The grand Leap of the Whale in that Chace up the Fall of Niagara is esteemed by all who have seen it, as one of the finest Spectacles in Nature!

Many a long dispute among Divines may be thus abridg’d:

None but the well-bred man knows how to confess a fault or acknowledge himself in error.

Certainlie these things agree,

Here comes the orator with his flood of words and his drop of reason.

Opportunity is the great bawd.

Avarice and happiness never saw each other.

Blame-all and praise-all are two blockheads.

Lawyers, Preachers, and Tomtits Eggs, there are more of them hatch’d than come to perfection.

Answ. Commend her among her Female Acquaintances.

God works wonders now and then;

The Body of B. Franklin, Printer; like the Cover of an old Book, its Contents torn out, and stript of its Lettering and Gilding, lies here, Food for Worms. But the Work shall not be wholly lost: for it will, as he believ’d, appear once more, in a new & more perfect Edition, corrected and amended by the Author.

I am about Courting a Girl I have had but little Acquaintance with; how shall I come to a Knowledge of her Fawlts? and whether she has the Virtues I imagine she has?

Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy into a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphroditism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.

Ils naquirent, ils souffrirent, ils moururent .