Sigmund Freud Quotes

Men have never been good, they are not good and they never will be good.

We suppose mankind more honest than they are.

I got fed up with the human race, really. I got a very negative feeling about human potentials. And for a while, I thought I might write a book without any human beings in it whatsoever.

The problem isn't that people don't understand how good things are. It's that they know, from personal experience, that things really aren't that good.

Everyone is born sincere and die deceivers.

The belief that the good in American society will finally win out... I don't believe any more.

I am a profound pessimist both about life and about human relations and about politics and ecology. Humans are inadequate and stupid creatures who sooner or later make a mess, and those who are trying to do good do a lot more damage than those who are muddling along.

I'm one of these people who tries to look for the good in people, but I've learnt that, actually, no, some people fundamentally just are not nice.

People are no damned good.

The Goddamn human race deserves itself, and as far as I'm concerned it can have it.

In Kurosawa's films, the tragedy is that this strong man was crushed by corruption or mistrust at the end.

I am an anarchist in politics and an impressionist in art as well as a symbolist in literature. Not that I understand what these terms mean, but I take them to be all merely synonyms of pessimist.

People tend to believe the bad rather than the good.

Pessimism is as American as apple pie - frozen apple pie with a slice of processed cheese.

We have a Sunday code and a weekday code. We preach good and practice evil. We clothe the wolf of our actions in the sheep's clothing of our beautiful phrases.

Hypocrisy is a fearful evil, and every thing which has a tendency to produce it should be avoided.

I have been reading the morning paper. I do it every morning-knowing well that I shall find in it the usual depravities and basenesses and hypocrisies and cruelties that make up civilization, and cause me to put in the rest of the day pleading for the damnation of the human race. I cannot seem to get my prayers answered, yet I do not despair.

If mankind is naturally good, he is sure going against his nature more and more of the time. It sounds like a bad joke: the paranoids are after us.

I have found little 'good' about human beings. In my experience, most of them are trash.

Taking things not as they ought to be, but as they are, I fear it must be allowed that Macchiavelli will always have more disciples than Jesus.

I am not optimistic, but I've never been optimistic about humankind or America. The evidence never looks good in terms of forces for good actually becoming prominent.

A cynic who was still saddened whenever his jaundiced view of mankind was confirmed.

I am not fooling myself with dreams of immortality, know how relative all literature is, don't have any faith in mankind, derive enjoyment from too few things. Sometimes these crises give birth to something worth while, sometimes they simply plunge one deeper into depression, but, of course, it is all part of the same thing.

The good, we do it; the evil, that is fortune; man is always right, and destiny always wrong.

Cynicism formulates issues clearly, but only to dismiss them.