Sigmund Freud Quotes

Next to the striking of fire and the discovery of the wheel, the greatest triumph of what we call civilization was the domestication of the human male.

Without the restraints of religion and social worship, men become savages much sooner than savages become civilized by means of religion and civil government.

Civilization is based on a clearly defined and widely accepted yet often unarticulated hierarchy. Violence done by those higher on the hierarchy to those lower is nearly always invisible, that is, unnoticed. When it is noticed, it is fully rationalized. Violence done by those lower on the hierarchy to those higher is unthinkable, and when it does occur is regarded with shock, horror, and the fetishization of the victims.

Civilisation is a conspiracy.

No country can reach a high stage of civilization without a leisure class.

Rousseau defined civilizations as when people build fences.

You used the word "civilization", which means a set of abstractions, symbols, conventions. Experience tends to be vicarious; emotions are predigested and electrical; ideas become more real than things.

Civilization is an enormous device for economizing knowledge,.

Any group of people that has been subordinate absorbs the idea of our own subordination, and that it is natural, and comes to think that the only way to survive is to identify with the powerful. And I think that is not surprising, and it is what happens to a lot of right-wing women. I mean they think they better do what the powerful tell them do otherwise they'll be in even more trouble.

There are many faculties in man, each of which takes its turn of activity, and that faculty which is paramount in any period and exerts itself through the strongest nation, determines the civility of that age: and each age thinks its own the perfection of reason.

The seeds of civilization are in every culture, but it is city life that brings them to fruition.

Anger makes people feel uncomfortable, because the minute somebody shows it, it puts you in a position where you can't laugh or make light of something... not to trivialise it I don't mean. But your reaction to anger is supposed to be fear or returned anger. So, you're really trying to control a situation when you show anger and it's a very weak position to take. It often works on people who aren't in a position to fight back.

Power is everywhere...because it comes from everywhere.

There's never been a civilization that has rewritten what marriage and family means and survived.

Civilization, let me tell you what it is. First the soldier, then the merchant, then the priest, then the lawyer. The merchant hires the soldier and priest to conquer the country for him. First the soldier, he is a murderer; then the priest, he is a liar; then the merchant, he is a thief; and they all bring in the lawyer to make their laws and defend their deeds, and there you have your civilization!

From the beginning, this culture - civilization - has been a culture of occupation.

One might say that science itself, and civilization and art, are all about different orderings of the world - to contain it, and to make it in some sense intelligible, communicable. And bearable.

The western nations of Europe, who now so immeasurably surpass their former savage progenitors, and stand at the summit of civilization, owe little or none of their superiority to direct inheritance from the old Greeks, though they owe much to the written works of that wonderful people.

The evolution of cultures appears to follow the pattern of the evolution of species. The many different forms of culture which arise correspond to the "mutations" of genetic theory. Some forms prove to be effective under prevailing circumstances and others not, and the perpetuation of the culture is determined accordingly.

Man's conquest of Nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men. There neither is nor can be any simple increase of power on Man's side. Each new power won by man is a power over man as well.

For art to be 'unpolitical' means only to ally itself with the 'ruling' group.

A complex society is not necessarily more advanced than a simple one; it has just adapted to conditions in a more complicated way.

There's no such thing as civilization. The word just means the art of living in cities.

In any given society the authority of man over man runs in inverse proportion to the intellectual development of that society.

What feminism calls patriarchy is simply civilization , an abstract system designed by men but augmented and now co-owned by women.