Tony Campolo Quotes

I first read Sigmund Freud's 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle' as a young girl, and it helped me to understand that there are thousands of possible ways to interpret our experience, that everything has a meaning, and that interpretation is the key to reality. This was the first step to becoming a writer.

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.

Freud said that we are born as a tabula rasa. This is a model that simply is too superficial and inadequate.

The basic assumption of the secular society is that modernity overcomes religion.

Between the ages of 24 and 27, I read Freud's complete works, everything that had been translated into English. It was very stimulating intellectually. But I did not accept his view of neurosis or of human nature.

I have a deep fascination with human nature, with all its virtues and all its defects.

Since the 18th century, many Western intellectuals have predicted religion's imminent demise.

Modernity, the child of the Enlightenment, failed when it became apparent that the good society cannot be achieved by unaided reason.

My assumption is that fundamentally the picture of the human animal, as developed by Freud, is largely right.

And these two elements are at odds with one another because Freud is utterly adversary to almost all the ways of structuring the human experience found in Western religions. No Western religion can countenance Freud's view of man.

The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity.

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?

We entered the 20th century trying to deal with three ideas purporting to define or describe or explain three spheres of action, development and conflict: Darwin on the natural world, Freud on the internal world, Marx on the economic world.

I think that technology is essentially a continuation of a divestment of theological power that's been happening since The Enlightenment. It's the idea that God can see and hear everything.

The ideal of progress, freedom of thought, and the decline of ecclesiastical power go together.

If the ignorance of nature gave birth to gods, the knowledge of nature is calculated to destroy them.

I have studied Freud and that kind of thing. I just never thought I would need it.

Man must feel the earth to know himself and recognize his values... God made life simple. It is man who complicates it.

I admire our ancestors, whoever they were. I think the first self-conscious person must have shaken in his boots. Because as he becomes self-conscious, he's no longer part of nature. He sees himself against nature. He looks at the vastness of the universe and it looks hostile.

Freud taught us that it wasn't God that imposed judgment on us and made us feel guilty when we stepped out of line. Instead, it was the superego - that idealized concept of what a good person is supposed to be and do - given to us by our parents, that condemned us for what had been hitherto regarded as ungodly behavior.

I got disappointed in human nature as well and gave it up because I found it too much like my own.

I think Freud is about contamination, but I think that is something he learned from Shakespeare, because Shakespeare is about nothing but contamination, you might say.

Freud had a gene for inefficiency, and I think I have a gene for efficiency.

By any reasonable measure of achievement, the faith of the Enlightenment thinkers in science was justified.

You don't have to be Sigmund Freud to surmise that war has a perverse appeal for the human race, nor is the attraction limited to religious fanatics committing mass murder and suicide for the greater glory of God.