Quotes About Defense

If your opponent is better armed and has longer reach, then surprise is your only ally. And then you'd better hope he's half asleep.

When you realize someone is trying to hurt you, it hurts less.

No, the menace of the supernatural is that it attacks where modern minds are weakest, where we have abandoned our protective armor of superstition and have no substitute defense.

Not one of us, even after last night, can say the word ghost without a little involuntary smile. No, the menace of the supernatural is that it attacks where modern minds are weakest, where we have abandoned our protective armor of superstition and have no substitute defense.

No ghost in all the long histories of ghosts has ever hurt anyone physically. The only damage done is by the victim to himself. […] No, the menace of the supernatural is that it attacks where modern minds are weakest, where we have abandoned our protective armor of superstition and have no substitute defense.

the menace of the supernatural is that it attacks where modern minds are weakest, where we have abandoned our protective armor of superstition and have no substitute defense.

Right?" he said. "I think we are all incredibly silly to stay. I think that an atmosphere like this one can find out the flaws and faults and weaknesses in all of us, and break us apart in a matter of days. We have only one defense, and that is running away. At least it can't follow us, can it? When we feel ourselves endangered we can leave, just as we came. And," he added dryly, "just as fast as we can go.

Only two months had passed since I had been traded to play defense for the Red Deer Rebels. In that time, I had learned to expect great hockey moves from Jason. I had watched him stickhandle while sliding on his knees. I had admired the way he hip-checked guys from out of nowhere. And I had been dazzled once to see him score with two guys wrapped around his shoulders. In my 25 games since joining this team in January, I had learned to expect nearly anything from #33.

Neurotics complain of their illness, but they make the most of it, and when it comes to taking it away from them they will defend it like a lioness her young.

It is a predisposition of human nature to consider an unpleasant idea untrue, and then it is easy to find arguments against it.

When people criticise me, I know how to defend myself. But I'm powerless in the face of praise.

The liberty of the individual is not a benefit of culture. It was greatest before any culture, though indeed it had little value at that time, because the individual was hardly in a position to defend it.

repression—which we must carefully note is not a suspension. The excitations in question are produced as usual but are prevented from attaining their aim by psychic hindrances, and are driven off into many other paths until they express themselves in a symptom.

A joke will allow us to exploit something ridiculous in our enemy which we could not bring forward openly or consciously.

Here we may be assisted by the idea that a defence against an unwelcome internal process will be modelled upon the defence adopted against an external stimulus, that the ego wards off internal and external dangers alike along identical lines.

An important element in the theory of repression is the view that repression is not an event that occurs once but that it requires a permanent expenditure [of energy]. If this expenditure were to cease, the repressed impulse, which is being fed all the time from its sources, would on the next occasion flow along the channels from which it had been forced away, and the repression would either fail in its purpose or would have to be repeated an indefinite number of times.

No stronger impression arises from the resistances during the work of analysis than of there being a force which is defending itself by every possible means against recovery and which is absolutely resolved to hold on to illness and suffering.

At any rate, we can see that repression is not the only means which the ego can employ for the purpose of defence against an unwelcome instinctual impulse. If it succeeds in making an instinct regress, it will actually have done it more injury than it could have by repressing it. Sometimes, indeed, after forcing an instinct to regress in this way, it goes on to repress it.

It was anxiety which produced repression and not, as I formerly believed, repression which produced anxiety.

We should be quite wrong if we pictured the ego and the id as two opposing camps and if we supposed that, when the ego tries to suppress a part of the id by means of repression, the remainder of the id comes to the rescue of the endangered part and measures its strength with the ego. This may often be what happens, but it is certainly not the initial situation in repression. As a rule the instinctual impulse which is to be repressed remains isolated.

The aggressive impulse flows mainly from the destructive instinct; and we have always believed that in a neurosis it is against the demands of the libido and not against those of any other instinct that the ego is defending itself.

She compensated for this sense of inferiority by making fun of everything. I did not notice it then, but she never made fun of my faults, only of my virtues;

But I know my only defense is to answer, "I think it because it is true," thereby eliminating my subjectivity;

Oppression tries to defend itself by its utility.