We may insist as often as we like that man's intellect is powerless in comparison to his instinctual life, and we may be right in this. Nevertheless, there is something peculiar about this weakness. The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it will not rest until it has gained a hearing. Finally, after a countless succession of rebuffs, it succeeds.

There is no likelihood of our being able to suppress humanity's aggressive tendencies... Complete suppression of man's aggressive tendencies is not an issue; what we may try is to direct it into a channel other than that of warfare.

The dream is the liberation of the spirit from the pressure of external nature, a detachment of the soul from the fetters of matter.

An intimate friend and a hated enemy have always been indispensable requirements for my emotional life; I have always been able to create them anew, and not infrequently my childish ideal has been so closely approached that friend and enemy coincided in the same person.

The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.

Religion restricts the play of choice and adaptation, since it imposes equally on everyone its own path to the acquisition of happiness and protection from suffering. Its technique consists in depressing the value of life and distorting the picture of the real world in a delusional manner - which presupposes an intimidation of the intelligence. At this price, by forcibly fixing them in a state of psychical infantilism and by drawing them into a mass-delusion, religion succeeds in sparing many people an individual neurosis. But hardly anything more.

We believe that civilization has been created under the pressure of the exigencies of life at the cost of satisfaction of the instincts.