Free sexual intercourse between young males and respectable girls" was urgently necessary or society was "doomed to fall a victim to incurable neuroses which reduce the enjoyment of life to a minimum, destroy the marriage relation and bring hereditary ruin on the whole coming generation.

Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock.

The pleasure principle long persists, however, as the method of working employed by the sexual instincts, which are so hard to 'educate', and, starting from those instincts, or in the ego itself, it often succeeds in overcoming the reality principle, to the detriment of the organism as a whole.

Psychiatry is the art of teaching people how to stand on their own feet while reclining on couches.

The time comes when each of us has to give up as illusions the expectations which, in his youth, he pinned upon his fellow-men, and when he may learn how much difficulty and pain has been added to his life by their ill-will.

Dreams are the guardians of sleep and not its disturbers.

Perhaps the gods are kind to us, by making life more disagreeable as we grow older. In the end death seems less intolerable than the manifold burdens we carry