Repression Quotes

• Fearful people are more dependent, more easily manipulated and controlled, more susceptible to deceptively simple, strong, tough measures and hard-line postures. ... They may accept and even welcome repression if it promises to relieve their insecurities.

  George Gerbner

  Strong, Fear, Simple

  Nancy Signorielli, George Gerbner (1988). “Violence and Terror in the Mass Media: An Annotated Bibliography”, p.21, Greenwood Publishing Group

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• What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.

  Sigmund Freud

  Life, Time, Book

  Sigmund Freud (2016). “Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex (Annotated)”, p.18, Sigmund Freud

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• The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression.

  W. E. B. Du Bois

  Inspirational, Inspiring, Memorial Day

  John Brown ch. 13 (1909)

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• Repression is not the way to virtue. When people restrain themselves out of fear, their lives are by necessity diminished. Only through freely chosen discipline can life be enjoyed and still kept within the bounds of reason.

  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

  Discipline, People, Way

  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (2001). “Flow: the psychology of optimal experience”

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• Societies held together by fear and repression may offer the illusion of stability for a time, but they are built upon fault lines that will eventually tear asunder.

  Barack Obama

  Powerful, Tears, Together

  Remarks at the Department of State, www.presidency.ucsb.edu. May 19, 2011.

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• No matter how much restriction civilization imposes on the individual, he nevertheless finds some way to circumvent it. Wit is the best safety valve modern man has evolved; the more civilization, the more repression, the more need there is for wit.".

  Sigmund Freud

  Men, Civilization, Safety

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• Repression forces your mind to be more deeply entrenched in those things from which you are trying to escape.

  Vimala McClure

  Mind, Trying, Force

  Vimala McClure (2012). “A Woman's Guide to Tantra Yoga”, p.37, New World Library

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• If you're going to hold someone down you're going to have to hold on by the other end of the chain. You are confined by your own repression.

  Toni Morrison

  Peace, Ties, Diversity

  FaceBook post by Toni Morrison from Oct 31, 2011

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• Repression breeds hate; hate menaces stable government.

  Louis D. Brandeis

  Hate, Government, Menace

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• And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.

  John Steinbeck

  Strength, Wrath, Sound

  John Steinbeck (2016). “The Grapes of Wrath”, p.191, Hamilton Books

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• When decorum is repression, the only dignity free men have is to speak out.

  Abbie Hoffman

  Men, Speaks Out, Dignity

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• Every good movement passes through five stages, indifference, ridicule, abuse, repression, and respect.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Inspirational, Abuse, Awakening

  Mahatma Gandhi (2005). “All Men Are Brothers”, p.144, A&C Black

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• Equality of opportunity is freedom, but equality of outcome is repression.

  Dick Feagler

  Opportunity, Liberty, Libertarian

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• You assume we are all sexually stable; while on the other hand, as I have become acquainted with people, I find that they are all perverted sinners, one way or another, that the whole
  society is corrupt and rotten and repressed and unconscious that it exhibits its repression in various forms of social sadism.

  Allen Ginsberg

  Hands, People, Sadism

  Allen Ginsberg, Louis Ginsberg, Michael Schumacher (2002). “Family Business: Selected Letters Between a Father and Son”, p.21, Bloomsbury Publishing USA

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• Every dictatorship has ultimately strangled in the web of repression it wove for its people, making mistakes that could not be corrected because criticism was prohibited.

  Robert Kennedy

  Mistake, People, Criticism

  Robert F. Kennedy (1998). “Make Gentle the Life of the World: The Vision of Robert F. Kennedy”, Harcourt

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• Education is the most powerful tool countries have for boosting economic growth, increasing prosperity and forging more just, peaceful and equitable societies. Where educational deprivation exists, it breeds conflict and enables repression.

  Wendy Kopp

  Education, Country, Powerful

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• If repression has indeed been the fundamental link between power, knowledge, and sexuality since the classical age, it stands to reason that we will not be able to free ourselves from it except at a considerable cost.

  Michel Foucault

  Birthday, Power, Age

  Michel Foucault (2012). “The History of Sexuality: An Introduction”, p.5, Vintage

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• Blow the dust off the clock. Your watches are behind the times. Throw open the heavy curtains which are so dear to you - you do not even suspect that the day has already dawned outside.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Time, Blow, Dust

  "Expulsion". Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's letter to the Secretariat of the Soviet Writers' Union (November 12, 1969) as translated in "Solzhenitsyn: A Documentary Record" edited by Leopold Labedz, 1970.

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• We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.

  John Stuart Mill

  Evil, Liberty, Would Be

  On Liberty ch. 2 (1859)

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• The savage repression of blacks, which can be estimated by reading the obituary columns of the nation's dailies, Fred Hampton, etc., has not failed to register on the black inmates.

  George Jackson

  Reading, Black, Savages

  George Jackson (1970). “Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson”, Chicago Review Press

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• The only justification for repressive institutions is material and cultural deficit. But such institutions, at certain stages of history, perpetuate and produce such a deficit, and even threaten human survival.

  Noam Chomsky

  History, Survival, Institutions

  Noam Chomsky (2003). “For Reasons Of State”, p.404, Penguin Books India

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• In the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows.

  Edmund Burke

  Prejudice, Grove, Ends

  'Reflections on the Revolution in France' (1790) p. 115.

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• Repression is an evolutionary adaptation permitting us to function under the burden of our expanded consciousness. For what we are conscious of could drive us mad.

  Camille Paglia

  Mad, Consciousness, Adaptation

  Camille Paglia (2018). “Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism”, p.44, Canongate Books

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• Anger is generally seen as an unwelcome presence in our midst, however natural it may be. Although each person, and each society, is charged with how anger is to be appropriately channeled, the denial of anger, or its continuous repression, is a deep source of our psychopathology and will invariably seek its expression in a less healthful fashion.

  James Hollis

  Fashion, Anger, Expression

  James Hollis (2008). “Why Good People Do Bad Things: Understanding Our Darker Selves”, p.48, Penguin

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• Learning to "just say no" to emotional reactions isn't repression. Saying no means not engaging the frustration, anger, judgment, or blame. Without engagement, you won't have anything to repress.

  Doc Childre

  Anger, Mean, Emotional

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