The attempt to escape from pain, is what creates more pain.

The hide was being flayed off the still living body of the Revolution so that a new age could slip in to it; as for the red bloody meat, the steaming innards – they were...

a very strong endorsement… of the basic objectives established (by the 19-nation NATO alliance) … to stop the repression in Kosovo.

This is what it means to be a woman in this world. Every step is a bargain with pain. Make your black deals in the black wood and decide what you’ll trade for power. For...

Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.

The psychoanalytic liberation of memory explodes the rationality of the repressed individual. As cognition gives way to re-cognition, the forbidden images and impulses of childhood begin to tell the truth that reason denies.

Being in a state of denial is auniversally human response tosituations which threaten tooverwhelm. People who were abusedas children sometimes carry theirdenial like precious cargo without aport of destination. It enabled us tosurvive our childhood...

Those who nurse secrets, nurse a chaotic world of amplified silence.

And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.

Tension, in the long run, is a more dangerous force than any feud known to man.

It is pointless to ask: Why then is sex so secret? What is this force that so long reduced it to silence and has only recently relaxed its hold somewhat, allowing us to question it...

Why would a person prefer the accusations of guilt, unworthiness, ineptitude – even dishonor and betrayal- to real possibility? This may not seem to be the choice, but it is: complete self effacement, surrender to...

Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.

Survival depends on denial, and death comes swiftly to those who forsake it.

All lived lives of dignity and repression.

Those who speak of progression but are afraid of change are self-repressed and therefore unable to reach any further than their eyes can already see.

Know that it is your birthright to awaken. Seeking Truth is the ultimate quest of every moral citizen. Truth is felt first in the heart, and then the mind. The voice of your conscience comes...

Love is a kind of symptom that arises through the repression of libido.

If desire causes suffering, it may be because we do not desire wisely, or that we are inexpert at obtaining what we desire. Instead of hiding our heads in a prayer cloth and building walls...

Without realizing that the past is constantly determining their present actions, they avoid learning anything about their history. They continue to live in their repressed childhood situation, ignoring the fact that is no longer exists,...

But the true nature which we repress continues nevertheless to abide within us. Thus it is that at times, if we read the latest masterpiece of a man of genius, we are delighted to find...

I get what it’s like to want something, but to try and force yourself to really believe that you don’t.

Carelessness on the part of revolutionaries has always been the best aid the police have.

What then did you expect when you unbound the gag that muted those black mouths? That they would chant your praises? Did you think that when those heads that our fathers had forcibly bowed down...

…ideas are definitely unstable, they not only CAN be misused, they invite misuse–and the better the idea the more volatile it is. That’s because only the better ideas turn into dogma, and it is this...

Your love for beauty has been perverted, repressed and savaged by hateful and controlling elements in the world.

When we’re afraid, we lose all sense of analysis and reflection. Our fear paralyzes us. Besides, fear has always been the driving force behind all dictators’ repression.

We all live under some repression; we have to, it’s part of the deal.

Why are you dressed as a man?” Neeva said. “Why do you act like…” She paused. “Why do you act like… like one of them?” Her voice rose, challenging and accusatory. “Them,” she said again....

The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.

Because you have no memory for things that happened ten or twenty years ago, you’re still mouthing the same nonsense as two thousand years ago. Worse, you cling with might and main to such absurdities...

The very absence of the freedom to criticise against your own or any other government is all the more a reason to loudly shout-out for democracy! If that is wrong, Drew boldly went on, -then...

The cases described in this section (The Fear of Being) may seem extreme, but I have become convinced that they are not as uncommon as one would think. Beneath the seemingly rational exterior of our...

When distinction of any kind, even intellectual distinction, is somehow resented as a betrayal of the American spirit of equal opportunity for all, the result must be just this terror of individualistic impulses setting us...

As she had been walking from the ward to that room, she had felt such pure hatred that now she had no more rancor left in her heart. She had finally allowed her negative feelings...

Repression. Her therapist, Dr. Solomon, loved the word. He’d say it slowly, letting it roll off his tongue. Sometimes he’d add a chin stroke for good measure. He always looked pleased when he did this,...

It’s all society is, the repressed sex drives of men, the objectification of women, their paranoia, the posturing, the macho stances, the beauty standard, it’s all just one charade masking a never ending hard on.

We could not be fulfilled if we weren’t inauthentic some of the time—inauthentic, that is, in relation to such things as our passing desires to throttle our children, poison our spouse, or end our marriage...

[A]dventures befall the unadventurous as readily, if not as frequently, as the bold. Adventures are a logical and reliable result – and have been since at least the time of Odysseus – of the fatal...

First Afghanistan, now Iraq. So who’s next? Syria? North Korea? Iran? Where will it all end?’ If these illegal interventions are permitted to continue, the implication seems to be, pretty soon, horror of horrors, no...

You can count the bruises on your heart easily enough, but numbering sins is a far tricker matter. Men are eternally forgetting for their benefit. They leave it to the World to remeber, and to...

Unexpressed grief leaves the deepest scars.

Regulation of sexual behavioris the preferred route to wider socialcontrol.

When you have half of Caironese in slums, when you don’t have clean water, when you don’t have a sewer system, when you don’t have electricity, and on top of that you live under one...

Life was taking its vengeance on me, and that vengeance consisted merely in coming back, nothing more. Every case of madness involves something coming back. People who are possessed are not possessed by something that...

You could continue to repress and think about the life you could have had or you can take what you want from life and see that the world finds that person infinitely more irresistible…

It is not only negative feelings that become blocked. The repression extends to more and more of his emotional capacity.When one is given an anesthetic in preparation for surgery, it is not merely the capacity...

There are many roles that people play and many images that they project. There is, for example, the “nice” man who is always smiling and agreeable. “Such a nice man,” people say. “He never gets...

… you sometimes had to force people to say things they would rather not articulate, just so they could hear their own words. It was interesting the way people could know things and not know...

Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a...