Sigmund Freud Quotes

It is hard to imagine, considering the inherent silliness, cruelty and superstition of the human race, how it has contrived to last as long as it has. The witch-hunting, the torturing, the gullibility, the massacres, the intolerance, the wild futility of human behaviour over the centuries is hardly credible. And the laws, as they stand today, are almost inconceivably stupid. With all this brilliant scientific knowledge of atom splitting and nuclear physics, etc., we are still worshipping at different shrines, imprisoning homosexuals, imposing unnecessary and completely irrelevant restrictions on each other. Hearts can be withdrawn from human beasts, dead hearts, and, after a little neat manipulation, popped back again as good as new. The skies can be conquered. Sputniks can whiz round and round the globe and be controlled and guided. People are still genuflecting before crucifixes and Virgin Marys, still persecuting other people for being coloured or Jewish or in some way different from what they apparently should be. There are wars being waged at this very moment in Indonesia, Algeria, the Middle East, Cyprus, etc. The Pope still makes pronouncements against birth control. The Ku-Klux-Klan is still, if permitted, ready to dash out and do some light lynching. God, for millions of people, is still secure in his heaven, and My Fair Lady opened in London last night.

Homo sapiens, the only creature endowed with reason, is also the only creature to pin its existence on things unreasonable.

Nothing defines humans better than their willingness to do irrational things in the pursuit of phenomenally unlikely payoffs. This is the principle behind lotteries, dating, and religion.

But we all recognise the primary foible of frail humanity - our propensity for embracing hope and shunning logic, our tendency to believe what we desire rather than what we observe.

I can measure the motion of bodies but I cannot measure human folly.

We are the creatures of imagination, passion, and self-will, more than of reason or even of self-interest. Even in the common transactions and daily intercourse of life, we are governed by whim, caprice, prejudice, or accident. The falling of a teacup puts us out of temper for the day; and a quarrel that commenced about the pattern of a gown may end only with our lives.

Superstition is a part of the very being of humanity; and when we fancy that we are banishing it altogether, it takes refuge in the strangest nooks and corners, and then suddenly comes forth again, as soon as it believes itself at all safe.

Man is many things, but he is not rational.

People in this world are not often logical.

Passion and prejudice govern the world; only under the name of reason.

Man is not a rational animal, he is a rationalizing animal.

Who should know better than a cosmetician that human beings are less than rational creatures?

Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.

The prejudices of superstition are superior to all others, and have the strongest influence on the human mind.

The melancholy have the best sense of the comic, the opulent often the best sense of the rustic, the dissolute often the best sense of the moral, and the doubter often the best sense of the religious.

What would have been the effect upon religion if it had come to us through the minds of women?

Human beings are not creatures of logic; we are creatures of emotion. And we do not care what's true. We care how it feels.

The great men of the earth are but the marking-stones on the road of humanity; they are the priests of its religion.

True, you don't have to be religious to be crazy, but it helps.

There are those who deny me the right to speak of God, because I am not a believer. And I say that I have every right in the world. I want to talk about God because it is a problem that affects all humanity.

Missionaries are perfect nuisances and leave every place worse than they found it.

He is a true fugitive who flies from reason.

I am, in plainer words, a bundle of prejudices - made up of likings and dislikings.

I don't think any human being is truly free. We're so tethered to our own insecurities and hampered by our fears and our prejudices. I think it's human nature that we're never going to be free.