We should picture the instrument that carries our mental functioning as resembling a compound microscope or photographic apparatus.

Not to know the past is to be in bondage to it, while to remember, to know, is to be set free.

What we call happiness in the strictest sense comes from the (preferably sudden) satisfaction of needs which have been dammed up to a high degree.

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.

The game replaces sexual enjoyment by pleasure in movement.

It could be ventured to understand obsessive compulsive neurosis as the pathological counterpart of religious development, to define neurosis as an individual religiosity; to define religion as a universal obsessive compulsive neurosis.

History is just new people making old mistakes.