Sigmund Freud

psychiatrist

• The paranoid is never entirely mistaken.

• Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar..

• I do not in the least underestimate bisexuality. . . I expect it to provide all further enlightenment.
  • Letter from Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess (25 March 1898)

• And now, the main thing! As far as I can see, my next work will be called "Human Bisexuality." It will go to the root of the problem and say the last word it may be granted to say--the last and the most profound.
  • Letter from Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess (7 August 1901)

• A man's heterosexuality will not put up with any homosexuality, and vice versa.
  • Analysis Terminable and Interminable

• Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation, it cannot be classified as an illness.
  • Letter to an American mother's plea to cure her son's homosexuality, 1935

• Religion... comprises a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality, such as we find in an isolated form nowhere else but in amentia, in a state of blissful hallucinatory confusion.

• Admittedly an unusual state, but not one that can be stigmatized as pathological.
  • Referring to romantic love in Civilization and its Discontents

• Every normal person, in fact, is only normal on the average. His ego approximates to that of the psychotic in some part or other and to a greater or lesser extent.

• A fear of weapons is a sign of retarded sexual and emotional maturity."
  • Sigmund Freud, "General Introduction to Psychoanalysis". Retrieved from "http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Guns"

• I can most highly recommend the Gestapo to everyone.
  • When Gestapo officials forced Freud to sign a statement saying that he had not been mistreated, the 82-year-old doctor added this comment after his signature.

• The moment a man begins to question the meaning and value of life, he is sick.

• It must be admitted that women have but little sense of justice, and this is no doubt connected with the preponderance of envy in their mental life.

• Sadism is all right in its place, but it should be directed to proper ends.

• I have found little that is "good" about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all.

• He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.

• Woe to you, my Princess, when I come... you shall see who is the stronger, a gentle girl who doesn't eat enough or a big wild man who has cocaine in his body.

• The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.

• The only thing about masturbation to be ashamed of is doing it badly.

• America is a mistake.

• The pleasure of satisfying a savage instinct, undomesticated by the ego, is uncomparably much more intense than the one of satisfying a tamed instinct. The reason is becoming the enemy that prevents us from a lot of possibilities of pleasure.