Psycho-analysis has taught us that a boy's earliest choice of objects for his love is incestuous and that those objects are forbidden ones - his mother and his sister. We have learnt, too, the manner in which, as he grows up, he liberates himself from this incestuous attraction. A neurotic, on the other hand, invariably exhibits some degree of psychical infantilism. He has either failed to get free from the psychosexual conditions that prevailed in his childhood or he has returned to them - two possibilities which may be summed up as developmental inhibition and regression.

Neither in my private life nor in my writings, have I ever made a secret of being an out-and-out unbeliever.

After all, we did not invent symbolism; it is a universal age-old activity of the human imagination.

One... gets an impression that civilization is something which was imposed on a resisting majority by a minority which understood how to obtain possession of the means to power and coercion. It is, of course, natural to assume that these difficulties are not inherent in the nature of civilization itself but are determined by the imperfections of the cultural forms which have so far been developed.

Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.

It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct.

I am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador