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

- Sigmund Freud

... most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.

- Sigmund Freud

One feels inclined to say that the intention that man should be 'happy' is not included in the plan of Creation.' ... We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast and very little from a state of things.

- Sigmund Freud

When a man has once brought himself to accept uncritically all the absurdities that religious doctrines put before him and even to overlook the contradictions between them, we need not be greatly suprised at the weakness of his intellect.

- Sigmund Freud

When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons. In vital matters, however, such as the choice of a mate or a profession, the decision should come from the unconscious, from somewhere within ourselves. In the important decisions of personal life, we should be governed, I think, by the deep inner needs of our nature.

- Sigmund Freud

It would be one of the greatest triumphs of humanity, one of the most tangible liberations from the constraints of nature to which mankind is subject, if we could succeed in raising the responsible act of procreating children to the level of a deliberate and intentional activity and in freeing it from its entanglement with the necessary satisfaction of a natural need.

- Sigmund Freud

Look into the depths of your own soul and learn first to know yourself, then you will understand why this illness was bound to come upon you and perhaps you will thenceforth avoid falling ill.

- Sigmund Freud

Opposition is not necessarily enmity; it is merely misused and made an occasion for enmity.

- Sigmund Freud

Knowledge is the intellectual manipulation of carefully verified observations.

- Sigmund Freud

It might be said of psychoanalysis that if you give it your little finger, it will soon have your whole hand.

- Sigmund Freud