Top 100 Quotes About Repression
#1. Tocqueville saw the brute repression of deviants as a necessity if men were to keep convincing themselves of their collective dignity through their collective sameness. The "poets of society," the men who challenged the norms, would have to be silenced so that sameness could be maintained.
Richard Sennett
#2. Love is a kind of symptom that arises through the repression of libido.
Frank Tallis
#3. No truly sophisticated proponent of repression would be stupid enough to shatter the facade of democratic institutions.
Murray Levin
#4. The queers of the sixties, like those since, have connived with their repression under a veneer of respectability. Good mannered city queens in suits and pinstripes, so busy establishing themselves, were useless at changing anything.
Derek Jarman
#5. I advocate revolutionary changes ... an end to capitalist exploitation, the abolition of racist policies, the eradication of sexism and the elimination of political repression. If that is a crime, then I am totally guilty
Assata Shakur
#6. During the course of 1989, more and more East Germans lost their fears of the state's repression and chicanery and went out on the streets. There was no turning back then. It is thanks to their courage the Wall was opened.
Angela Merkel
#7. I think societal instinct much deeper than sex instinct - and societal repression much more devastating.
D.H. Lawrence
#8. Converting the Internet into a system of surveillance thus guts it of its core potential. Worse, it turns the Internet into a tool of repression, threatening to produce the most extreme and oppressive weapon of state intrusion human history has ever seen.
Glenn Greenwald
#9. Repression may begin as a means to an end, but it always ends up being an end unto itself
Garry Kasparov
#10. Redford always has been a cool presence both before and behind the camera. His best movie as a filmmaker, 1994's 'Quiz Show,' exhibits a classicism verging on self-repression, and the social indignation in many of his films engages more than moves you.
Steve Erickson
#11. What we call 'normal' [sane] is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection and other forms of destructive action on our experience" (R. Laing, 1967, p. 27).
Michael Guy Thompson
#12. That's Catholicism for you. A perpetual war between repression and excess.
Joanne Harris
#13. Fear is unnatural. Lightning and thunder are unnatural. Pain, death, reality, these are all unnatural. We can't bear these things as they are. We know too much. So we resort to repression, compromise and disguise. This is how we survive the universe. This is the natural language of the species.
Don DeLillo
#14. The onset of mania occurs when repression is no longer able to resist the assaults of the repressed instincts.
Karl Abraham
#15. The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#16. Repression in the human psyche is tightly bundled. When it has been pulled out of the sprung package so often it is perhaps difficult to push it back in the box.
Graham Joyce
#17. Dreaming, in short, is one of the devices we employ to circumvent repression, one of the main methods of what may be called indirect representation in the mind.
Sigmund Freud
#18. Sexual repression is conduct unbecoming a Celt." I shrugged. "Better that than having to deal with guilt ferrets.
Kevin Hearne
#19. Poetry is often very critical of the culture from which it emerges. Quite often literary critics of a nationalist bent talk up the national culture, in a way that the literary texts don't. Poetry can bring out areas of denial and repression.
Edna Longley
#20. Repression is a seamless garment; a society which is authoritarian in its social and sexual codes, which crushes its women beneath the intolerable burdens of honour and propriety, breeds repressions of other kinds as well.
Salman Rushdie
#21. There is no point in lingering on the fallacies of the revolutionaries of unrepression; one could go on and on, but everything would come back to the same basic thing: the impossibility of living without repression.
Ernest Becker
#22. It did not seem to me that prejudice, poverty, discrimination, repression and racism were confined to the North of Ireland. I could see them everywhere I spoke and still cannot comprehend the mentality that argues that I should have pretended not to see them, because it wasn't my business.
Bernadette Devlin
#23. Key feature of sexual revolution is the large-scale publication and commercialization of details that were once secret. Sexuality has been trivialized. The interesting thing about this is that exaggerated portrayals apparently destroy desire more effectively than any repression.
Volkmar Sigusch
#24. Too often, I think, children are required to write before they have anything to say. Teach them to think and read and talk without self-repression, and they will write because they cannot help it.
Anne Sullivan Macy
#25. This story of benign judicial neglect of Nazis and collaborators forms a striking contrast with the systematic repression of the Greek Left, which lasted for over two decades.
Mark Mazower
#26. Truth will never imprison you. Only the repression of your conscience will. This is what is meant by 'THE TRUTH WILL SET YOU FREE'.
Suzy Kassem
#27. Through the eclipse of large areas of the self, by repression and inhibition as well as by idealization and externalization, the individual loses sight of himself; he feels, if he does not actually become, like a shadow without weight and substance.
Karen Horney
#28. Repressing is a natural instinct, but it doesn't allow for healing. Coming out of repression can be very similar to reliving the original fear. I'm sure not everyone who needs help gets help they need, and that may not necessarily mean they won't be okay.
Gwen Hayes
#29. The post-totalitarian malady has taken its most acute form in Romania. And it has taken place for very specific reasons. The repression here has been more cruel, more brutal, than in other states caught in the inferno of a 'socialist paradise.'
Octavian Paler
#30. Growing up in a small town, in the Midwest, and Catholic: Those are sort of three layers of repression.
Paul Rust
#31. One thing is for sure-none of the arts flourishes on censorship and repression. And by this time it should be evident that the American public is capable of doing its own censoring.
Eleanor Roosevelt
#33. In capitalist America economic repression of the masses is institutionalised to a point which not even Lenin could have foreseen . . . "The
John Le Carre
#34. If comedians were truly free of repression, there would not be an inherent need to perform for the love of a roomful of total strangers.
Matt Roper
#35. The workers aren't going to stop struggling. They're going to struggle to have a union and they have the right to have it. The police repression and the grower indifference to the workers' demands for recognition cannot go unheard so we're going to keep on struggling until we get that recognition.
Cesar Chavez
#36. New York is hard, cynical, ruthless, even beyond other cities. From their early repression its children emerge sophisticated, both stunted and overdeveloped, perverted, premature, forced by the artificiality of their environment.
Ernest Gruening
#37. Repression does for a true man or a nation what fire does for gold.
Mahatma Gandhi
#38. We live in a culture in which intelligence is denied relevance altogether, in a search for radical innocence, or is defended as an instrument of authority and repression. In my view, the only intelligence worth defending is critical, dialectical, skeptical, desimplifying.
Susan Sontag
#39. We all live under some repression; we have to, it's part of the deal.
Daniel Day-Lewis
#40. I have always believed that resistance against repression and violence is possible without relying on similar repression and violence. I have always believed that human civilization is the fruit of the effort of both women and men.
Tawakkol Karman
#41. Indigo has a purifying, stabilizing, cleansing effect when fear, repression, and obsessions have disturbed your mental body. Indigo food vibrations are: blackberries, blue plums, blueberries, purple brocoli, beetroot, and purple grapes.
Tae Yun Kim
#42. So when I read this story, it unlocked a volcano of unanswered questions, because the questions had never been asked. It was an opportunity to come to terms with the lot of repressed history - and history of repression.
Phillip Noyce
#43. Now they have come to the place where their faith can no longer feed on the bread of repression and violence. They ask for the bread of liberty, of public equality, and public responsibility. It must not be denied them.
Mordecai Wyatt Johnson
#44. The repression of virtuous instinct in the modern world is an incremental tragedy. Repress one instinct, and you repress many; other parts of consciousness go down, also.
Michael Leunig
#45. Stalinism is linked with a cult of personality and massive violations of the law, with repression and camps. There is nothing like that in Russia and, I hope, will never again be.
Vladimir Putin
#46. The policy of the repression of ideas cannot work and never has worked. The alternative to it is the long difficult road of education. To this the American people have committed.
Robert M. Hutchins
#47. I should like to raise the question whether the inevitable stunting of the sense of smell as a result of man's turning away from the earth, and the organic repression of the smell-pleasure produced by it, does not largely share in his predisposition to nervous diseases.
Sigmund Freud
#48. Everyone represses everything. Do you think any of these "normal" human beings really do exactly what they want to do all the time? 'Course not. It's just the same. We're middle-class and we're British. Repression is in our veins.
Matt Haig
#49. Mastering our emotions has nothing to do with asceticism or repression, for the purpose is not to break the emotions or deny them but to "break in" the emotions, making them teachable because they are tamed.
Os Guinness
#50. I think this is the case in the great majority of authoritarian states: on the surface, because of repression, everything seems frozen, but when the sun comes out and the ice melts, you find that there was a lot of life underneath all along.
Aung San
#51. One may always attempt as much insight, love, freedom of thought and expression, justice and tolerance as possible for oneself and the very few people who share one's truest life. To be a 'free lord' in secret is better than being a public slave, a willing accomplice of repression and injustice.
Hakim Bey
#52. You smell like tequila and sexual repression, Caroline.
Alice Clayton
#53. I think if women would indulge more freely in vituperation, they would enjoy ten times the health they do. It seems to me they are suffering from repression.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#54. The universal dress of philosophy and philanthropy can conceal repression, violations of the true personal, human,
local, civil, and national freedom
Johann Gottfried Herder
#55. It's not hard work that wears you out, but the repression of your true personality, and I've found a way of working that does not demand that.
Frances Hesselbein
#56. But the repressed merges into the id as well, and is merely a part of it. The repressed is only cut off sharply from the ego by the resistances of repression; it can communicate with the ego through the id.
Sigmund Freud
#57. There are many different rivers that lead into despair: there's poverty; there's political repression; there's gender apartheid - there's a sense of culture loss; there's religious fanaticism.
Lawrence Wright
#58. Back in medieval times, Victorian repression hadn't come in yet. People were bawdy and wild and more in touch with their true natures. If you look at the Bosch paintings or Bruegel, you see, when people are dancing, they're totally cutting loose.
Catherine Hardwicke
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. The tragedy of our day is the climate of fear in which we live, and fear breeds repression. Too often sinister threats to the Bill of Rights, to freedom of the mind, are concealed under the patriotic cloak of anti-communism.
Adlai Stevenson I
#62. As a tactic, violence is absurd. No one can compete with the Government in violence, and the resort to violence, which will surely fail, will simply frighten and alienate some who can be reached, and will further encourage the ideologists and administrators of forceful repression.
Noam Chomsky
#64. One-third of the world, it has been said, may be free- -but one-third is the victim of cruel repression
and the other one- third is rocked by the pangs of poverty, hunger and envy. More energy is released by the awakening of these new nations than by the fission of the atom itself.
John F. Kennedy
#65. After the desperate years of their own war, after six years of repression inside Spain and six years of horror in exile, these people remain intact in spirit. They are armed with a transcendent faith; they have never won, and yet they have never accepted defeat.
Martha Gellhorn
#66. The devotion that young Chinese feel to the Internet is driven by deep factors ranging from youth unemployment and income inequality to political repression and the demographic imbalance between men and women.
Evan Osnos
#67. When white-collar people get jobs, they sell not only their time and energy, but their personalities as well. They sell by the week, or month, their smiles and their kindly gestures, and they must practice that prompt repression of resentment and aggression.
C. Wright Mills
#68. Early on I saw the repression and idolatry of Stalinism, and when it cracked, I was open to religion again.
Lionel Blue
#69. North Korean students and intellectuals didn't dare to stage protests as their counterparts in other Communist countries did. There was no Prague Spring or Tiananmen Square. The level of repression in North Korea was so great that no organized resistance could take root.
Barbara Demick
#70. Repression by brute force is always a confession of the inability to make use of the better weapons of the intellect - better because they alone give promise of final success.
Ludwig Von Mises
#71. Democracy is the most realistic way for diverse peoples to resolve their differences, and share power, and heal social divisions without violence or repression.
Condoleezza Rice
#72. We speak here of the challenge of the dichotomies of war and peace, violence and non-violence, racism and human dignity, oppression and repression and liberty and human rights, poverty and freedom from want.
Nelson Mandela
#73. I am a 20th century escaped slave. Because of government persecution, I was left with no other choice than to flee from the political repression, racism and violence that dominate the U.S. government's policy towards people of color.
Assata Shakur
#74. I will not be standing for office. I'm nearing 70; there are younger people within our movement. I just wish to contribute intellectually to the historic process of taking Tunisia from the era of repression to one of democracy.
Rashid Al-Ghannushi
#75. Nine-tenths of all artistic creation derives its basic energy from the engine of repression and sublimation, and well beyond the strict Freudian definition of those terms.
John Fowles attended new College in Oxford. You might like to see my collection of Oxford trees at Rob's Bookshop.
John Fowles
#76. As with all forms of liberation, of which the liberation of women is only one example, it is easy to suppose in a time of freedom that the darker days of repression can never come again.
Jonathan Franzen
#77. When I started, rock and roll itself was the basic revolution to people of my age and situation. We needed something loud and clear to break through all the unfeeling and repression that had been coming down on us kids.
John Lennon
#78. When the gospel has been eclipsed (whether by repression, false religion secularism, humanistic philosophy, or spiritual decay within the church), the status of women has declined accordingly.
John F. MacArthur Jr.
#79. Repression is the only lasting philosophy. The dark deference of fear and slavery, my friend, will keep the dogs obedient to the whip, as long as this roof shuts out the sky.
Charles Dickens
#80. My name became known because I was, one might say accidentally the target of state repression and because so many people throughout the country and other parts of the world organized around the demand for my freedom.
Angela Davis
#81. Repression was the favored food of heresy.
Greg Keyes
#82. Equality of opportunity is freedom, but equality of outcome is repression.
Dick Feagler
#83. Where educational deprivation exists, it breeds conflict and enables repression.
Wendy Kopp
#84. When we were in the Dark Ages, it was a question of humanity somehow managing to forget about itself. We put God in the centre of society, and people forgot about their own nature and desires. There was a huge deal of repression.
Shakira
#85. 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
#86. Excision of my genitals didn't eliminate the human sex drive, and neither did the fear of hellfire. Repression only led to hypocrisy and lying, strategies that corrupt the human individual, and it failed to protect people from unwanted pregnancy and disease. The
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#87. Just as solidarity had an underside of repression, so liberalization had an underside of chaos;
Yuval Levin
#88. Far from checking the spread of immorality, repression has always extended and deepended it. Thus it is futile to oppose it by rigorous legislation which trespasses on individual liberty.
Daniel Guerin
#89. Every good movement passes through five stages, indifference, ridicule, abuse, repression, and respect.
Mahatma Gandhi
#91. Hemingway's minimalism is based on the psychological mechanics of repression. An echo of his approach can be detected in a favorite trope of 1980s minimalists: a pattern of reference to dire secrets and hidden wounds these authors didn't realize they were supposed to have imagined.
Madison Smartt Bell
#92. A just society is not one built on fear or repression or vengeance or exclusion, but one built on love. Love for our families. Love for our neighbors. Love for the least among us. Love for those who look different or worship differently. Love for those we don't even know.
John Legend
#93. The repression of the memory is dependent upon and related to the suppression of feeling, for as long as the feeling persists, the memory remains vivid.
Alexander Lowen
#94. My own feeling is that one should refuse to participate in any activity that implements American aggression - thus tax refusal, draft refusal, avoidance of work that can be used by the agencies of militarism and repression, all seem to me essential.
Noam Chomsky
#95. The history of African-American repression in this country rose from government-sanctioned racism. Jim Crow laws were a product of bigoted state and local governments.
Rand Paul
#96. Just as you cannot see, at pleasure, with your ears and you cannot, at will, hear with your eyes so too you cannot make the state act in the interests of the working people. As an organ in the social body, its purpose is for the repression of self-determination.
Rudolf Rocker
#97. I don't feel that men have been wrong. I don't feel that women are wrong for using their second attention to combat sexual repression. That's just how it's been.
Frederick Lenz
#98. The challenging of repression by a new generation of activists - from Malala Yousafzai to Pussy Riot - across the globe reminded us how many women are still fighting for basic human rights. Our great-grandmothers' struggle in all its shocking detail seemed so relevant.
Sarah Gavron
#99. During the 41 years that have elapsed since Costa Rica abolished its army, our fundamental freedoms have never been threatened, nor do we know a shameful history of repression.
Oscar Arias
#100. Israel should have exploited the repression of the demonstrations in China, when world attention focused on that country, to carry out mass expulsions among the Arabs of the territories.
Benjamin Netanyahu
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