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| And in the development of mankind as a whole, just as in individuals, love alone acts as a civilizing factor in the sense that it brings a change from egoism to altruism. | | Sigmund Freud | |
| And now look at the great war still devastating Europe: think of the colossal brutality, cruelty, and mendacity which is now allowed to spread itself over the civilized world. Do you really believe that a handful of unprincipled place—hunters and corrupters of men would have succeeded in letting loose all this latent evil, if the millions of their followers were not also guilty? | | Sigmund Freud | |
| Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves. | | Carl Gustav Jung | |
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| I have come to think of this humanist trend in psychology as a revolution in the truest, oldest sense of the word; the sense in which Galileo, Darwin, Einstein, Freud and Marx made revolutions, i.e. new ways of perceiving and thinking, new images of | | Abraham Maslow | |
| If a psychiatric and scientific inquiry were to be made upon our rulers, mankind would be appalled at the disclosures. | | Alfred Korzybski | |
| If we consider that all we deal with represents constantly changing sub-microscopic, interrelated processes which are not, and cannot be ‘identical with themselves’, the old dictum that ‘everything is identical with itself’ becomes in [today’s understanding of the universe] a principle invariably false to facts. | | Alfred Korzybski | |
| In the rough, a symbol is a sign that stands for something… Before a noise, etc., may become a symbol, something must exist for the symbol to symbolize. | | Alfred Korzybski | |
| It is now no mystery that some quite influential ‘philosophers’ were ‘mentally’ ill. | | Alfred Korzybski | |
| It seems to be my fate to discover only the obvious: that children have sexual feelings, which every nurse maid knows; and that the night dreams are just as much a wish fulfillment as day dreams. | | Sigmund Freud | |
| Let us repeat the two crucial negative premises as established firmly by all human experience: (1) Words are not the things we are speaking about; and (2) There is no such thing as an object in absolute isolation. | | Alfred Korzybski | |
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| No psychologist should pretend to understand what he does not understand... Only fools and charlatans know everything and understand nothing. | | Anton Chekhov | |
Sensation tell us a thing is.
Thinking tell us what it is this thing is.
Feeling tells us what this thing is to us. | | Carl Gustav Jung | |
| Sublimation of instinct is an especially conspicuous feature of cultural development; it is what makes it possible for higher psychical activities, scientific, artistic or ideological, to play such an important part in civilized life. If one were to yield to a first impression, one would say that sublimation is a vicissitude which has been forced upon the instincts entirely by civilization. But it would be wiser to reflect upon this a little longer. In the third place, finally, and this seems the most important of all, it is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct, how much it presupposes precisely the non-satisfaction (by suppression, repression or some other means?) of powerful instincts. This ‘cultural frustration’ dominates the large field of social relationships between human beings;we know already that it is the cause of the antagonism against which all civilization has to fight. | | Sigmund Freud | |
| The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best | | Paul Valery | |
| Those who love fairy-tales do not like it when people speak of the innate tendencies in mankind toward aggression, destruction, and, in addition, cruelty. God has made them in his own image, with his own perfections; no one wants to be reminded how hard it is to reconcile the undeniable existence-in spite of all the protestations of Christian Science-of evil with His omnipotence and supreme goodness. | | Sigmund Freud | |
| Thus, we see that one of the obvious origins of human disagreement lies in the use of noises for words. | | Alfred Korzybski | |
| To understand one's self is the classic form of consolation; to delude one's self is the romantic | | George Santayana | |
| We hate the criminal and deal severely with him, because we view in his deeds as in a distorting mirror our own criminal tendencies. | | Sigmund Freud | |
