Quotes About Repression

As Paul Watzlawick notes, that which is objectively repressed (unspeakable) soon becomes subjectively repressed (unthinkable). Nobody likes to feel like a coward and a liar constantly. It is easier to cease to notice where the official tunnel-reality differs from existential fact. Thus SNAFU accelerates and rigiditus bureaucraticus sets in — the last stage before all brain activity ceases and the pyramid is clinically dead as an intellectual entity.

But Charles Fort argued, at length, that such data is not uncommon at all; it is merely repressed by the same mechanisms of avoidance that Freud analyzed, the mechanisms that allow e.g. Roman Catholics and Marxists to forget things inconvenient to their emic realities.

To Buddhist Tibet, this is the unity of yab and yum; to Taoist China, the unity of yin and yang. The Occident perennially seeks to repress this thought, and perennially is haunted by half-awareness of it.

we all began female, and always had both sexual hormones in us. We always had masculine and feminine behavioral traits, which we had to train into gender-appropriate behaviors, even though they were traits that everyone has. We selectively encouraged or repressed traits, so for most of our history we have reinforced gender. But in our deepest selves we were always both.

Shuddering in his efforts to repress a yawn of nervousness, he asked in his flat northern voice: How´s Margaret these days? The other´s clay-like features changed indefinably as his attention, like a squadron of slow old battleships, began wheeling to face this new phenomenon , and in a moment or two he was able to say: Margaret.

Fervid atheism is usually a screen for repressed religion.

There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of Puritanism, and that is the impulse to punish the man with a superior capacity for happiness.

But it's well known that repression makes a religion flourish.

What's going on? A soul? Did you say, a soul? What the hell! Next thing you know we'll have cholera again. What did I tell you? [He tossed the thin one on his horns.] I told you so... we should operate on all of them, on the imagination. Extirpate the imagination. Surgery's the only answer... nothing but surgery...

When you hold some part of yourself in reserve you deny it exposure to life; you repress its energy and keep it from understanding what it needs to know.

On the surface, everyday life has become much more comfortable than ever before. Yet people still lead lives of quiet desperation. The source of this desperation is repression, a sense that you cannot be what you want to be, cannot feel what you want to feel, cannot do what you want to do.

One of the best ways of repressing emotions is artificial certainty.

Learn taciturnity and let that be your motto!

But then someday the truth would come out. It always did. Repress what you will, someday the truth comes out.

That was what people did when they wanted to stop a girl from doing something—they shamed her.

Asking questions, demanding explanations—these things always led to trouble. The moment a girl learned how to talk, she was told not to.

The events of his childhood had never left him. Instead the memory had grown watery, indistinct, like something he'd dreamed. Abused, molested: these were not terms he used, even to himself.

They have so smothered me in their middle-class refinement that I don't know how there can be any blood left in my veins. I lowered my eyes, put on a dismal, silly expression, just like them; I was just as dead-and-alive as they were.

Señor, ¿por qué no han de tener las mujeres derecho para encontrar guapos a los hombres que lo sean, y por qué ha de mirarse mal que lo manifiesten? (...) Si no lo decimos, lo pensamos, y no hay nada mas peligroso que lo reprimido y oculto, lo que se queda dentro.

The dictatorship is like an aria that never becomes an opera.

Regent, Boris Godonof, riveted the chains of slavery upon the wrists of many millions of human beings in Russia.

They shut me up in Prose – As when a little Girl They put me in the Closet – Because they liked me still – Still! Could themself have peeped – And seen my Brain – go round – They might as wise have lodged a Bird For Treason – in the Pound –

La politique [de la dictature bolchévik] n'est qu'une variante du communisme de guerre de 1920-1921 - avec de plus en plus de guerre (de répression armée) et de moins en moins de communisme. Son égalité est celle d'un pénitencier, sa liberté celle d'un groupe de forçats enchaînés. Pas étonnant que les bolcheviks affirment que la liberté est un préjugé bourgeois.

he would simply have to repress the emotions he was experiencing. Very unhealthy, psychologically speaking