Quotes About Repression

The people of Iran have had to endure repressive laws that have stifled their freedom of speech and religion for too long.

When decorum is repression, the only dignity free men have is to speak out.

You have created sexual embarrassment, repression, and shame—which has led to sexual inhibition, dysfunction, and violence. You will, as a society, always be inhibited about that over which you are embarrassed; always be dysfunctional with behaviors which have been repressed, and always act out violently in protest of being made to feel shame about that over which you know in your heart you should never have felt shame at all.

Love that is continually repressed becomes possessiveness, a very unnatural emotion.

You're not expressing a lot of emotion about these things." "Oh. Well. They're too big.

Not so lonely that that old, queer, unhappy restlessness had begun again within him; that craving for some place strange and different, which at the beginning of her marriage she had had to make such strenuous efforts to repress, and which yet faintly alarmed her, though it now sprang up at gradually lessening intervals.

never ceased to amaze him how a discredited philosophy and a repressive nation still attracted idealists.

Socialism, in other words, would not be possible until capitalism had exhausted its ability to expand and increase profits. That the end is coming is hard now to dispute, although one would be foolish to predict when. Global capitalism, in its final iteration, may replicate China's totalitarian capitalism, a brutal system sustained by severe repression where workers are modern-day serfs.

Capitalism would, in the end, Marx said, turn on the so-called free market, along with the values and traditions it claims to defend. It would in its final stages pillage the systems and structures that made capitalism possible. It would resort, as it causes widespread suffering, to harsher forms of repression to maintain social control. It would attempt, in a frantic last stand, to extract profit by looting and pillaging state institutions, contradicting its stated nature.

Nothing optional -- from homosexuality to adultery -- is ever made punishable unless those who do the prohibiting (and exact the fierce punishment) have a repressed desire to participate.

There still remain four irreducible objections to religious faith: that it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos, that because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum of servility with the maximum of solipsism, that it is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression, and that it is ultimately grounded on wish-thinking.

Nothing optional—from homo-sexuality to adultery—is ever made punishable unless those who do the prohibiting (and exact the fierce punishments) have a repressed desire to participate. As Shakespeare put it in King Lear, the policeman who lashes the whore has a hot need to use her for the very offense for which he plies the lash.

Nothing optional - from homosexuality to adultery - is ever made punishable unless those who do the prohibiting (and exact the fierce punishments) have a repressed desire to participate.

Christianity is too repressed to offer sex in paradise—indeed it has never been able to evolve a tempting heaven at all—but it has been lavish in its promise of sadistic and everlasting punishment for sexual backsliders, which is nearly as revealing in making the same point in a different way.

Nothing evokes the prurient like puritanism.

often inquisitors create heretics. And not only in the sense that they imagine heretics where they do not exist, but also that inquisitors repress the heretical putrefaction so vehemently that many are driven to share in it, in their hatred of the judges. Truly, a circle conceived by the devil.

If I wanted, I could remove the offending passage from the screen but not from the memory, thereby creating an archive of my repressions while denying omnivorous Freudians and virtuosi of variant texts the pleasure of conjecture, the exercise of their occupation, their academic glory. This is better than real memory, because real memory, at the cost of much effort, learns to remember but not to forget.

Charlot's eyes lighted up with fanatical fervor as he told about it; at last they were going to put down the labor unions and their revolutionary propaganda, and make sure that the traditional France would survive and dominate Western Europe. Lanny found the German Nazis strange and terrible people, but he found even more fantastic these Fascists of the Spanish and French Catholic pattern, who were building this machinery of repression in the name of Jesus Christ.

The poet must rethink her writing activities in such a way as to désoublier (to unforget), détaire (to unsilence), déterrer (to unbury), se désaveugler (to unbind), se dessourdier (to undeafen), in an endeavor to displace all that has been repressed, incorporated, appropriated. This is the poet's way of fighting.

Isabelle had heard this criticism all her life, but why should she hold her tongue? No one listened to her either way.

Nature meant his face to be expressive but he did not; for an expression is a give-away and he did not want to give anything away.

Our civilization represses not only "the instincts", not only sexuality, but any form of transcendence. Among one-dimensional men, it is not surprising that someone with an insistent experience of other dimensions, that he cannot entirely deny or forget, will run the risk either of being destroyed by the others, or of betraying what he knows.

What we call "normal" is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection and other forms of destructive action on experience. It is radically estranged from the structure of being. The more one sees this, the more senseless it is to continue with generalized descriptions of supposedly specifically schizoid, schizophrenic, hysterical "mechanisms."

We stuffed scary feelings down, and they made us insane. I think it is pretty universal, all this repression leading to violence and fundamentalism and self-loathing and addiction.