The Irish are the one race for which psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever... because they already live in a dream world.

The inclination to aggression constitutes the greatest impediment to civilization.

The ego represents what we call reason and sanity, in contrast to the id which contains the passions.

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.

In the long run, nothing can withstand reason and experience, and the contradiction religion offers to both is palpable.

It would be one of the greatest triumphs of humanity, one of the most tangible liberations from the constraints of nature to which mankind is subject, if we could succeed in raising the responsible act of procreating children to the level of a deliberate and intentional activity and in freeing it from its entanglement with the necessary satisfaction of a natural need.

It almost looks like analysis were the third of those 'impossible' professions in which one can be quite sure of unsatisfying results. The other two, much older-established, are the bringing up of children and the government of nations.