Quotes About Repression

#1. I regret it when I suppress my feelings too long and they burst forth in ways that are distorted or attacking or hurtful.

Carl R. Rogers

#2. Probably no other country in the 1920s - certainly not the United States, with its stark repression of the Left, vicious antiunion policies, and legally enshrined racism - had so wide a range of free speech, such a vital public sphere, as Germany.

Eric D. Weitz

#3. Everything we did in the 1960s was designed to fission, to weaken faith in and conformity to the 1950s social order. Our precise surgical target was the Judeo-Christian power monolith, which has imposed a guilty, inhibited, grim, anti-body, anti-life repression on Western civilization.

Timothy Leary

#4. See how it's a philosophy that's been handed to you by a bunch of men who were afraid. So instead, they overcompensate with hatred and violence and repression.

Frederick Lenz

#5. One mechanism of repression is the grand jury.

Michael Parenti

#6. Palestinian terrorism has to be rejected and condemned, yes. But it should not be translated defacto into a policy of support for a really increasingly brutal repression, colonial settlements and a new wall.

Zbigniew Brzezinski

#7. When reason sleeps, the monsters of repression will emerge.

Kate Morton

#8. 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

#9. The intelligence is clear: (Saddam) continues to believe his WMD programme is essential both for internal repression and for external aggression.

Tony Blair

#10. I would like to assure you that there is no organization or any sort of repression against people who don't agree with our actions, for example in Ukraine, Crimea, or any other external issue, no one from official government organs do this.

Vladimir Putin

#11. Sit peacefully in a church and think of church history: witchburning perhaps, or child abuse, genocide, the amassing of disgusting wealth, the repression of women, inquisitions, castrating child choir singers, the denial of Santa Claus and the support of fascists in power.

Kaz Cooke

#12. To play a repressed gay man, I had to explore what life was like in an era of sexual repression.

Leonardo DiCaprio

#13. Thought without expression is dynamic and gathers volume by repression. Evolution when blocked and suppressed becomes revolution.

Nellie L. McClung

#14. It is possible to resolve childhood repression safely and without confusion - something that has always been disputed by the most respected schools of thought.

Alice Miller

#15. 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

#16. [As in the case of] alcohol prohibition, illegality has driven organized crime, sent countless people to jail, and killed many thousands. Repression does not work.

Sam Branson

#17. The Gulag Archipelago, 'he informed an incredulous world that the blood-maddened Jewish terrorists had murdered sixty-six million victims in Russia from 1918 to 1957! Solzhenitsyn cited Cheka Order No. 10, issued on January 8, 1921: 'To intensify the repression of the bourgeoisie.'

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#18. The suburban landscape is alien and strange and exotic. I photograph it out of longing and desire. My photographs are also about repression and internal angst.

Gregory Crewdson

#19. The policy of repression of ideas cannot work and never has worked.

Robert M. Hutchins

#20. During the twentieth century, communist governments killed some 100 million of their own people in peacetime, either by repression or by famine.

Charles Wheelan

#21. For a politics of emancipation, the enemy that is to be feared most is not repression at the hands of the established order. It is the interiority of nihilism, and the unbounded cruelty that can come with its emptiness.

Alain Badiou

#22. I have seen such an immense change from the total repression and criminality of homosexuality in my lifetime. It does make me much more buoyant and optimistic about the future. If that change can occur in that time there's hope for many other changes.

Bob Brown

#23. The only reason I am a star is because of my repression. Nothing else would have driven me through all that if I was 'normal'.

John Lennon

#24. I couldn't have imagined that I would live long enough to see Egypt emancipated from decades of repression.

Mohamed ElBaradei

#25. Cade was a vampire. Zach had finally gotten over that. For the most part. Other people could argue about how vampires didn't exist, how they were just relics of folklore and sexual repression and nightmares. Zach had to work with Cade. Denial only got in the way.

Christopher Farnsworth

#26. Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.

Sigmund Freud

#27. 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

#28. On the surface, everyday life has become much more comfortable than ever before. Yet people still lead lives of quiet desperation. The source of this desperation is repression, a sense that you cannot be what you want to be, cannot feel what you want to feel, cannot do what you want to do.

Deepak Chopra

#29. Whereas Freud was for the most part concerned with the morbid effects of unconscious repression, Jung was more interested in the manifestations of unconscious expression, first in the dream and eventually in all the more orderly products of religion and art and morals.

Lewis Mumford

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

John Steinbeck

#31. As is often the case with religion, repression only led to expansion, and the rebellion continued still.

Damien P.

#32. If the parent represses the girl's anger not just once but over and over again, a deeper injury occurs: the girl will eventually dismantle her anger response. Ultimately, it's safer for her to cut off a part of her being than to battle the person on whom her life depends.

Patricia Love

#33. This much is clear: violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleansing of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul.

Robert Kennedy

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

Vimala McClure

#35. When we're afraid, we lose all sense of analysis and reflection. Our fear paralyzes us. Besides, fear has always been the driving force behind all dictators' repression.

Marjane Satrapi

#36. Fear breeds repression; that repression breeds hate; that hate menaces stable government; that the path of safety lies in the opportunity to discuss freely supposed grievances and proposed remedies; and that the fitting remedy for evil counsels is good ones.

Louis D. Brandeis

#37. Popular struggles to bring about a freer and more just society have been resisted by violence and repression, and massive efforts to control opinion and attitudes. Over time, however, they have met with considerable success, even though there is a long way to go, and there is often regression.

Noam Chomsky

#38. As if all that weren't enough, factor in the whole tedious millenial saga of female virtue, modesty, shame, repression, male ineptitude ... in short, a cruel combo of anatomical inheritance and sexual inhibition for the gal set; a nature-culture one-two punch, right to the female pleasure principle.

Laura Kipnis

#39. When inhibition has become the de facto setting in a person's manner, stiffness and lack of spontaneity produces an unnatural self-repression. Life looks gray, dull, and rigid, without space for relaxation or play to burst forth in natural ways.

Alexandra Katehakis

#40. The dream of capitalism is to co-opt people with higher living standards without redistributing any wealth. Without co-optation, widespread repression is the only guarantor of gross inequality.

Holly Sklar

#41. Rage can easily convert to hatred. There is a wish to control the bad object in order to avoid persecution or fear. This control is achieved by the development of obsessive control mechanisms, which psychopathologically regulate the repression of aggression in such an individual.

Sam Vaknin

#42. It was this society and culture that among other things - including economic opportunities here and repression in Europe - attracted subsequent generations of immigrants to this country.

Samuel P. Huntington

#43. We need to bring out the rabble-rousing nature of people. We are gonna need un-repression. We need hundreds of people farting up a storm. We need a big-time, old-fashioned, furious, fart storm.

Allan Dare Pearce

#44. Conquest directed toward
the interior of the country is called repression or propaganda ("the first step on the road to hell," according
to Frank). Directed toward the exterior, it creates the army.

Albert Camus

#45. The state in which the ideas existed before being made conscious is called by us repression, and we assert that the force which instituted the repression and maintains it is perceived as resistance during the work of analysis.

Sigmund Freud

#46. The attempt to escape from pain, is what creates more pain.

Gabor Mate

#47. I am beginning to realize that taking the self out of our essays is a form of repression. Taking the self out feels like obeying a gag order
pretending an objectivity where there is nothing objective about the experience of confronting and engaging with and swooning over literature.

Kate Zambreno

#48. There is a crucial difference between a one-state solution and a binational state. In general, nation-states have been imposed with substantial violence and repression for one reason - because they seek to force varied and complex populations into a single mold.

Noam Chomsky

#49. At 21, I discovered repression and injustice. The army would shoot students with real bullets.

Tahar Ben Jelloun

#50. When we begin to lift the veils of censorship and repression in painting, a great deal of energy is unleashed.

Michele Cassou

#51. I had so many secrets and so much social repression throughout my life. I guess I'm just a shy person and feel like my true self is unacceptable to most people.

Ezra Furman

#52. Regulation of sexual behavior
is the preferred route to wider social
control.

Alexander Cockburn

#53. Lovely, quite girl, no trouble, no trouble at all. You wouldn't even know she was in the house. That is often the yarn twisted around women's wrists.

Sue Monk Kidd

#54. Silence descended on the house. [....] Amma must have sensed that this was the sort of silence that, left unchallenged, could consume the family from within.

Vivek Shanbhag

#55. The Chinese are good at repression and can be pretty ruthless about it.

Salman Rushdie

#56. Against what is stupid, nonsensical, erroneous, and evil, [classical] liberalism fights with the weapons of the mind, and not with brute force and repression.

Ludwig Von Mises

#57. It's all society is, the repressed sex drives of men, the objectification of women, their paranoia, the posturing, the macho stances, the beauty standard, it's all just one charade masking a never ending hard on.

Trevor D. Richardson

#58. Reason has never failed men. Only force and repression have made the wrecks in the world.

William Allen White

#59. She disinterred the wickedness in normality, cataloguing the ways conformity and repression tip into psychosis, persecution, and paranoia, into cruelty and its masochistic, injury-cherishing twin. Like

Shirley Jackson

#60. Your love for beauty has been perverted, repressed and savaged by hateful and controlling elements in the world.

Bryant McGill

#61. Survival depends on denial, and death comes swiftly to those who forsake it.

B.G. Bowers

#62. Pagans earn their reputations for relaxed sexual mores, often in rebellion from the repression of their religions during adolescence. At a Pagan festival, one need only lower one's guard to be offered sex under the cloaking of the sacred.

Thomm Quackenbush

#63. Repression speaks about sex better than any other form of discourse / or so the modern experts maintain. How do people / get power over one another? is an algebraic question

Anne Carson

#64. Those who nurse secrets, nurse a chaotic world of amplified silence.

B.G. Bowers

#65. I know some really outstanding Turkish journalists, and have been pleased and honored to be able to join with them a few times in their courageous protests against state terror and repression.

Noam Chomsky

#66. People with a culture of poverty suffer much less from repression than we of the middle class suffer and indeed, if I may make the suggestion with due qualification, they often have a hell of a lot more fun than we have.

Brian Friel

#67. If we want to protect people against dictators or repression or torture, don't you need that rule to be universal so as to not end up with a situation where we do so only when it is comfortable, profitable and safe?

Donald Tusk

#68. The Government of Iraq also owes a debt to the American and coalition forces who are fighting the insurgency and helping put that country back together after decades of repression.

Ike Skelton

#69. Repression is fantastic.

Courteney Cox

#70. The existing liberties and the existing gratifications are tied to the requirements of repression: they themselves become instruments of repression.

Herbert Marcuse

#71. I'm a seething cauldron of disconnected rage on the inside, Lieutenant." "Ah, repression," Keyes said. "Excellent. Try to avoid taking a potshot at me when you finally blow, please." "I can't promise anything, sir," Alan said.

John Scalzi

#72. You'd have to give people free rein to attack the local councils or to destroy the school authorities, like the students who break up the repression in the universities. It's already happening, though people have got to get together more.

John Lennon

#73. Bras are a ludicrous invention; but if you make bralessness a rule, you're just subjecting yourself to yet another repression.

Germaine Greer

#74. Far more perversions arise from repression than from expression

Brandi Lynn Ryder

#75. It just seemed to me to be a great story, set back in its time but something that seemed to have relevance for our time. Now that the film is coming out, it looks like we're back in another time where repression of expression is all the rage.

Philip Kaufman

#76. I get what it's like to want something, but to try and force yourself to really believe that you don't.

Cora Carmack

#77. No danger flowing from speech can be deemed clear and present unless the incidence of the evil apprehended is so imminent that it may befall before there is an opportunity for full discussion. Only an emergency can justify repression.

Louis D. Brandeis

#78. Yet what use against the deceit of a state are the memories of a child?

Aminatta Forna

#79. We suffer from a repression of the sublime.

Roberto Assagioli

#80. I didn't feel that I was an American at all, with all that suburban ideal and sex repression and general dreary newspaper grey censorship of all our real human values ...

Jack Kerouac

#81. Satyagraha thrives on repression till at last the repressor is tired of it and the object of satyagraha is gained.

Mahatma Gandhi

#82. As the many male victims of rape in the regime's disgusting jails can testify, this state-run pathology of sexual repression and sexual sadism is not content to degrade women only.

Christopher Hitchens

#83. 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

#84. But it's well known that repression makes a religion flourish.

Frank Herbert

#85. We should not be comfortable or content in a society where the only way to remain free of surveillance and repression is if we make ourselves as unthreatning, passive, and compliant as possible.

Glenn Greenwald

#86. Control does not come from strong police forces, does not come from oppression and repression, does not come from violating people's rights or giving the security systems undue powers

Hanan Ashrawi

#87. 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

#88. Because you have no memory for things that happened ten or twenty years ago, you're still mouthing the same nonsense as two thousand years ago. Worse, you cling with might and main to such absurdities as 'race,' 'class,' 'nation,' and the obligation to observe a religion and repress your love.

Wilhelm Reich

#89. Pop music is created by repression - and then the system takes it and makes even more money with it!

Michel Gondry

#90. Was his memory failing or had he so disciplined it in the repression of unpleasant facts that he had damaged his sense of the truth?

John Cheever

#91. By the late 1970s, repression and economic chaos were causing increasing unrest throughout Latin America. Army strongmen were forced to cede power in Peru, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Ecuador, Bolivia, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras and the Dominican Republic.

Stephen Kinzer

#92. Unexpressed grief leaves the deepest scars.

Marty Rubin

#93. (T)hey at last understood that their problems would never have been solved by trying to cover them up or choke them back or pretend they didn't exist. By repression. No, their problems could only be solved by expression. By telling their tales, and by making up new ones, too.

Adam Gidwitz

#94. You can count the bruises on your heart easily enough, but numbering sins is a far tricker matter. Men are eternally forgetting for their benefit. They leave it to the World to remeber, and to the Outside to call them to harsh accout. One hundred Heavens ... for one thousand Hells.

R. Scott Bakker

#95. If you really want to be secure, you will have to live a life of insecurity. If you really want to be alive, you will have to be ready to die at any moment. This is the illogic of life! If you want to be authentically true, then you will have to risk. Repression is a way to avoid the risk. For

Osho

#96. The reason why there's such a rigid repression of the mentally ill is the psyche of humanity senses something. It senses that it doesn't want to deal with the unknown.

Frederick Lenz

#97. Power tends to get confused with repression.

Olivia Wilde

#98. Without question, purity is beautiful. We're not talking about repression or prudishness, but about having a confident and serene sense of your dignity and worth.

Jason Evert

#99. Everyone starved. Starvation is a potent weapon, and the Bolsheviks are happy to wield it. The cheapest way to get rid of the opposition is to starve them. Lenin did it the expensive way, shooting them, but the Soviets can no longer afford that.

Jane Smiley

#100. It seems characteristic of the mind of man that the repression of what is natural to humans must be abhorred, but that what is natural to an infinitely more natural animal must be confined within the bounds of a reason peculiar only to men
more peculiar sometimes than seems reasonable at all.

Beryl Markham