Tony Campolo Quotes

When I was writing my dissertation, I wrote about Freud and the process of sublimation, which is when you learn to stop breast-feeding, or stop going to the toilet whenever you want to. It's about learning to repress a desire for instant gratification.

Sin, also for those who don't have faith, exists when one goes against one's conscience. To listen to and obey it means, in fact, to decide in face of what is perceived as good or evil. And on this decision pivots the goodness or malice of our action.

She belongs to a race of delightful women, who never do any harm, whom everybody calls good, and who are very severe on those who do not pretend to be good.

The eye of God ends up inside, so that, in the end, you take care of judgment and punishment yourself.

Who's to say that there is any more support for Freud's psychoanalytic concept of the superego than there is for that old time religion that asserted that there is a God who ordains what is right and wrong, and that His righteousness endures for all generations?

Sigmund Freud was the apostle of disbelief. He was the one who made psychoanalysis a part of our culture, and in so doing he kicked out a flying buttress that had been essential for holding up our cathedral of faith.

The stigma that was once attached to things society deemed unhealthy served the purpose of making them undesirable. With the stigma gone, many people see little reason not to do whatever feels good at the moment.

Is it really so difficult to tell a good action from a bad one? I think one usually knows right away or a moment afterward, in a horrid flash of regret.

If enough people openly engage in conduct once considered reprehensible, we rewrite the rule book and assume that God, as a good democrat, will go along.

Blame is for God and small children.

When God hands you a gift, he also hands you a whip; and the whip is intended for self-flagellation solely.

I think my heart is quite selfish. If I followed my heart, I would not be a good person. But I have moral principles. I have to sit down and reflect.

A man's conscience, like a warning line on the highway, tells him what he shouldn't do - but it does not keep him from doing it.

This is his first punishment, that by the verdict of his own heart no guilty man is acquitted.

If some really acute observer made as much of egotism as Freud has made of sex, people would forget a good deal about sex and find the explanation for everything in egotism.

I come from a highly moral family. I was very much taught what was right and wrong, and in my perception of things, I did something that was very wrong. To know that, and to then be so publicly exposed, was very hard.

Shame may restrain what law does not prohibit.

Now, I don't want to get off on a rant here, but guilt is simply God's way of letting you know that you're having too good a time.

Friends don't care about issues like dwarf tossing.

A murderer is regarded by the conventional world as something almost monstrous, but a murderer to himself is only an ordinary man. It is only if the murderer is a good man that he can be regarded as monstrous.

I suffer from Irish-Catholic guilt. Guilt is a good reality check. It keeps that 'do what makes you happy' thing in check.

There is no doubt that religion had already waned under the onslaught of the Enlightenment, but it was Freud who provided the radically new understanding of human nature that made any religious explanation of the whats and whys of our personhood seem naive.

What is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.

Playing the good guy is tough because you know as well as I do, in real life, you have to watch your P's and Q's and conduct yourself in a respectable manner if you expect to have friends.

About morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.