Quotes About Repression

The main pillar of every organised religion, with few exceptions, is the subjugation, repression, even the annulment of women in the group.

In this manner, secretly, ....let the years go by, silencing their hearts and souls to the point where, from so much keeping quiet, they forgot the words with which to express their real feelings and became strangers...

I was raised Catholic in the Midwest, so I can't enjoy anything.

Christian Europe was always death, Karl, death and repression. Out and down in the colonies, life can be indulged, life and sensuality in all its forms, with no harm done to the Metropolis, nothing to soil those cathedrals, white marble statues, noble thoughts. . . . No word ever gets back. The silences down here are vast enough to absorb all behavior, no matter how dirty, how animal it gets.

If a small child's needs are not met with at least some regularity, there is a tremendous sense of frustration, of powerlessness to get anything that he or she needs. Over time, as the frustration builds up and is repressed again and again, it becomes too painful to face, and a sense of futility develops. If it isn't acknowledged and allowed expression, the frustration will continue to hide under the surface and grow into a feeling of futility.

Denying so much repressed rage requires tremendous energy—energy that could be used to create an authentic and exciting life.

The Swiss psychoanalyst Alice Miller reports that many adults are unable to remember their childhoods. According to Miller, these memories are repressed at a time when it is necessary for the child's emotional survival to forget. To experience the pain of wounds inflicted by parents on whom the child is totally dependent is, in the child's undeveloped mind, tantamount to death. And so the child learns not to feel—and eventually, not to remember—these hurts.

The character had repressed all his guilt and self-doubt, the things that might make him appealing to viewers. He was simply a cold, oppressive force, a modern woman's nightmare of what the boys in power can do, how they will let her go so far and then the gate slams shut and she can travel no further. No one will listen to her, no one will believe her, she has no money

Literature is that which denounces and slashes apart the repressing machine at the level of the signified.

Though Anne was born in Alabama and schooled in Mississippi, she had traveled North, and, like many Southerners, gained a theoretical understanding of the concept of cold. But the mind is an overprotective parent. What it doesn't care for, it hides. Like many inhabiting the subtropics, Anne had repressed the reality of subzero mercury.

There are things in the human mind that are not meant to be seen or touched, things seldom even acknowledged by our conscious selves. Fantasies, impulses, rages, hatreds, primitive instincts. They're buried deep, usually, and that's where they belong.

The most repressed, and damaged, and 'unteachable' students that I have to deal with are those who were the star performers at bad high schools. Instead of learning how to be warm and spontaneous and giving, they've become armoured and superficial, calculating and self-obsessed. I could show you many many examples where education has clearly been a destructive process.

Puritanism—the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy. —H. L. Mencken (1949)

Our government has found that the most effective way to control a person is not by the ballot or the bullet, but rather by the 'bucket'. Today, in a country that fought a revolution to rid itself of a repressive government and excessive taxes, government takes 40 percent of everything we earn in the form of taxes.

Good does not become better by being exaggerated, but worse, and a small evil becomes a big one through being disregarded and repressed. The Shadow is very much a part of human nature, and it is only at night that no shadows exist.

This kind of for-getfulness was called repression, and is the normal mechanism by which nature protects the individual from such painful feelings as are caused by unpleasant and unacceptable experiences and thoughts, the recognition of his egoistic nature, and the often quite unbearable conflict of his weaknesses with his feelings of idealism.

Repression, as we have seen, is not directed solely against sexuality, but against the instincts in general, which are the vital foundations, the laws governing all life.

The resemblance between the Prometheus of "Pandora" and the Prometheus of Spitteler ends here. He is merely a collective itch for action, so one-sided that it amounts to a repression of eroticism. His son Phileros ('lover of Eros') is simply erotic passion; for, as the son of his father, he must, as is often the case with children, re-enact under unconscious compulsion the unlived lives of his parents.

In reality fantasies mean much more than that, for they represent at the same time the other mechanism—of repressed extraversion in the introvert, and of repressed introversion in the extravert.

If the shadow figure contains valuable, vital forces, they ought to be assimilated into actual experience and not repressed. It is up to the ego to give up its pride and priggishness and to live out something that seems to be dark, but actually may not be. This can require a sacrifice just as heroic as the conquest of passion, but in an opposite sense.

by repressing disagreeable thoughts she created something like a psychic vacuum which, as usually happens, gradually became filled with anxiety. Had she troubled herself consciously with her thoughts she would have known what was lacking, and she would then have needed no anxiety states as a substitute for the absence of conscious suffering.

It is our own repressed desires that stick like arrows in our flesh.

P198 Describe John Moore's brother's death: but at heart I believe now, as I believed then, that it was essentially the result of growing up in a household, and a world, where emotional expression of any kind was at best frowned on and at worst strangled. Unfortunately, I'd stated this opinion during the funeral, and was nearly forced into an asylum as a result.

There were many causes of his unhappiness, but at heart I believe now, as I believed then, that it was essentially the result of growing up in a household, and a world, where emotional expression of any kind was at best frowned on and at worst strangled.