- “A civilization which leaves so large a number of its participants unsatisfied and drives them into revolt neither has nor deserves the prospect of a lasting existence.”
- “America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success.”
- “Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock.”
- “If youth knew; if age could.”
- “I have found little that is “good” about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all. That is something that you cannot say aloud, or perhaps even think.”
- “Just as a cautious businessman avoids investing all his capital in one concern, so wisdom would probably admonish us also not to anticipate all our happiness from one quarter alone. “
- “Love and work… work and love, that’s all there is. “
- “Men are more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine. “
- “Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.”
- “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”
- “The goal of all life is death.”
- The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is “What does a woman want?”
- “The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.”
- “The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing. “
- “We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love.”
- “Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me.”
- “Incidentally, why was it that none of all the pious ever discovered psycho-analysis? Why did it have to wait for a completely godless Jew? ”
~ Sigmund Freud