The continuous disasters of man's history are mainly due to his excessive capacity and urge to become identified with a tribe, nation, church or cause, and to espouse its credo uncritically and enthusiastically, even if its tenets are contrary to reason, devoid of self-interest and detrimental to the claims of self-preservation.We are thus driven to the unfashionable conclusion that the trouble with our species is not an excess of aggression, but an excess capacity for fanatical devotion.
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Violence arises not out of superfluity of power but out of powerlessness.
Violence arises not out of superfluity of power but out of powerlessness.
It is important that man dreams, but it is perhaps equally important that he can laugh at his own dreams.
It is important that man dreams, but it is perhaps equally important that he can laugh at his own dreams.
However human, envy is certainly not one of the sources of discontent that a free society can eliminate. It is read more
However human, envy is certainly not one of the sources of discontent that a free society can eliminate. It is probably one of the essential conditions for the preservation of such a society that we do not countenance envy, not sanction its demands by camouflaging it as social justice, but treat it, in the words of John Stuart Mill, as "the most anti-social and evil of all passions.
Psychoanalysis has changed American psychology from a diagnostic to a therapeutic science, not because so many patients are cured by read more
Psychoanalysis has changed American psychology from a diagnostic to a therapeutic science, not because so many patients are cured by the psychoanalytic technique, but because of the new understanding of psychiatric patients it has given us, and the new and different concept of illness and health.
We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the read more
We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.
Because they know not the forces of nature, and in order that they may have comrades in their ignorance, they read more
Because they know not the forces of nature, and in order that they may have comrades in their ignorance, they suffer not that others should search out anything, and would have us believe like rustics and ask no reason...But we ask in all things a reason must be sought.
It is loneliness that makes the loudest noise. This is true of men as of dogs.
It is loneliness that makes the loudest noise. This is true of men as of dogs.
Rudeness luxuriates in the absence of self-respect.
Rudeness luxuriates in the absence of self-respect.
Savage peoples are ruled by passion, civilized peoples by the mind. The difference lies not in the respective natures of read more
Savage peoples are ruled by passion, civilized peoples by the mind. The difference lies not in the respective natures of savagery and civilization, but in their attendant circumstances, institutions, and so forth. The difference, therefore, does not operate in every sense, but it does in most of them. Even the most civilized peoples, in short, can be fired with passionate hatred for each other.
