You wanted to kill your father in order to be your father yourself. Now you are your father, but a dead father.

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.

But the repressed merges into the id as well, and is merely a part of it. The repressed is only cut off sharply from the ego by the resistances of repression; it can communicate with the ego through the id.

Our fascination with gold is related to the fantasies of early childhood.

Love is a state of temporary psychosis.

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

The religions of mankind must be classed among the mass-delusions of this kind. No one, needless to say, who shares a delusion ever recognizes it as such.