Repressed Quotes

• 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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• The onset of mania occurs when repression is no longer able to resist the assaults of the repressed instincts.

  Karl Abraham

  Able, Instinct, Assault

  Karl Abraham (1988). “Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis”, p.137, Karnac Books

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• Your body needs to be held and to hold, to be touched and to touch. None of these needs is to be despised, denied, or repressed. But you have to keep searching for your body's deeper need, the need for genuine love. Every time you are able to go beyond the body's superficial desires for love, you are bringing your body home and moving toward integration and unity.

  Henri Nouwen

  Love, Moving, Home

  Henri Nouwen (2010). “The Inner Voice of Love: A Journey Through Anguish to Freedom”, p.19, Image

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• May it not be asked of every intelligent friend to the liberties of his country, whether the power exercised in such an act as this ought not to produce great and universal alarm? Whether a rigid execution of such an act, in time past, would not have repressed that information and communication among the people which is indispensable to the just exercise of their electoral rights? And whether such an act, if made perpetual, and enforced with rigor, would not, in time to come, either destroy our free system of government, or prepare a convulsion that might prove equally fatal to it?

  James Madison

  Country, Communication, Exercise

  James Madison (1836). “The Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution: As Recommended by the General Convention at Philadelphia in 1787. Together with the Journal of the Federal Convention, Luther Martin's Letter, Yates's Minutes, Congressional Opinions, Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of '98-'99, and Other Illustrations of the Constitution”, p.574

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• Mankind became hysterical in the Middle Ages because it poorly repressed the sexual impressions of its Greek boyhood.

  Karl Kraus

  Greek, Age, Boyhood

  Karl Kraus (1976). “Half-truths & one-and-a-half truths: selected aphorisms”

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• I do not like to encourage personalized politics, so we would not like it to be thought that just because certain political personalities were attacked, this means the situation is very grave. The true gravity of the situation comes from the fact that ordinary members of the NLD are repressed all the time. We don't want a completely paralyzed political organization, while a select few leaders are protected by international attention.

  Aung San Suu Kyi

  Mean, Organization, Leader

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• I think the Muslim religious is a little too tight. It doesn't fit humans. Humans can't possibly fit into it, so there are a lot of really unhappy people, terribly repressed. It is a religion that works against you because the template don't fit. It's not human, you know.

  Jerry Garcia

  Religious, Thinking, People

  Source: medium.com

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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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• Above all else, we seek connection - with parts of ourselves that we have repressed, with other people, and with the larger universe. We cannot experience life in its fullness unless we have an intimate relationship with another human being and, beyond that, a feeling of connection with the world around us.

  Harville Hendrix

  Intimate Relationships, People, Feelings

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• My research has shown me that when emotions are expressed-which is to say that the biochemicals that are the substrate of emotion are flowing freely-all systems are united and made whole. When emotions are repressed, denied, not allowed to be whatever they may be, our network pathways get blocked, stopping the flow of the vital feel-good, unifying chemicals that run both our biology and our behavior.

  Candace Pert

  Running, Emotional, Feel Good

  Candace Pert (2012). “Molecules Of Emotion: Why You Feel The Way You Feel”, p.241, Simon and Schuster

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• Everybody knows from his own experience that after laughter, good laughter, a belly laugh, you almost feel that you have taken an ice-cold shower; a peace, a silence, a freshness... The same is true about crying, but very few people know the secret of crying because it is more repressed than laughter.

  Rajneesh

  Laughter, Taken, Ice

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• Lose/Win people bury a lot of feelings. And unexpressed feelings come forth later in uglier ways. Psychosomatic illnesses often are the reincarnation of cumulative resentment, deep disappointment and disillusionment repressed by the Lose/Win mentality. Disproportionate rage or anger, overreaction to minor provocation, and cynicism are other embodiments of suppressed emotion. People who are constantly repressing, not transcending feelings toward a higher meaning find that it affects the quality of their relationships with others.

  Stephen Covey

  Disappointment, Winning, People

  Stephen R. Covey (1994). “Daily Reflections for Highly Effective People: Living THE SEVEN HABITS OF HIGHLY SUCCESSFUL PEOPLE Every Day”, p.192, Simon and Schuster

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• Without realizing that the past is constantly determining their present actions, they avoid learning anything about their history. They continue to live in their repressed childhood situation, ignoring the fact that is no longer exists, continuing to fear and avoid dangers that, although once real, have not been real for a long time.

  Alice Miller

  Real, Past, Long

  Alice Miller (1997). “The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self”, p.2, Basic Books

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• Like dreams, farces show the disguised fulfillment of repressed wishes.

  Eric Bentley

  Dream, Wish, Farce

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• Unexplained pain may sometimes direct our attention to something unacknowledged, something we are afraid to know or feel. Then it holds us to our integrity, claiming the attention we withhold. The thing which calls our attention may be a repressed experience or some unexpressed and important part of who we are. Whatever we have denied may stop us and dam the creative flow of our lives. Avoiding pain, we may linger in the vicinity of our wounds, sometime for many years, gathering the courage to experience them.

  Rachel Naomi Remen

  Pain, Integrity, Years

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• We define boredom as the pain a person feels when he's doing nothing or something irrelevant, instead of something he wants to do but won't, can't, or doesn't dare. Boredom is acute when he knows the other thing and inhibits his action, e.g., out of politeness, embarrassment, fear of punishment or shame. Boredom is chronic if he has repressed the thought of it and no longer is aware of it. A large part of stupidity is just the chronic boredom, for a person can't learn, or be intelligent about, what he's not interested in, when his repressed thoughts are elsewhere.

  Paul Goodman

  Pain, Blessing, Intelligent

  "Growing Up Absurd" by Paul Goodman, (pp. 71-72), 1956.

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• Good does not become better by being exaggerated, but worse; And a small evil becomes a big one through being disregarded and repressed.

  Carl Jung

  Evil, Doe, Bigs

  Carl Gustav Jung, Herbert Read, Gerhard Adler, Michael Scott Montague Fordham (1973). “The Collected Works of C.G. Jung: Psychology and religion, West and East”

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• Sundry manifestations of nature in men and women, are greatly perverted by existing social conventions upheld by both. There are feelings which, under our predatory régime, with its adapted standard of propriety, it is not considered manly to show; but which, contrariwise, are considered admirable in women. Hence repressed manifestations in the one case, and exaggerated manifestations in the other; leading to mistaken estimates.

  Herbert Spencer

  Men, Feelings, Social

  HERBERT SPENCER (1874). “THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY”, p.421

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• Were we to still be circumcising the hood of the female clitoris, we would not have difficulty considering this a continuation of our tradition to keep girls sexually repressed. America's reflexive continuation of [male] circumcision-without-research reflects the continuation of our tradition to desensitize boys to feelings of pain, to prepare them to question the disposability of their bodies no more than they would question the disposability of their foreskins.

  Warren Farrell

  Girl, Pain, Boys

  Warren Farrell (1994). “The myth of male power: why men are the disposable sex”

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• When one read's Kierkegaard's profound analyses of anxiety and despair or Nietzsche's amazingly acute insights into the dynamics of resentment and the guilt and hostility which accompany repressed emotional powers, one might pinch oneself to realize that one is reading works written in the last century and not some new contemporary psychological analysis.

  Rollo May

  Reading, Emotional, Profound

  Rollo May (2015). “The Discovery of Being”, p.53, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Of all the qualities of human beings that are injured, narrowed, or repressed in the Corporate State, it is consciousness, the most precious and the most fragile, that suffers the most.

  Charles A. Reich

  Suffering, Quality, Consciousness

  charles a. reich (1970). “the greening of america”

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• I think the democratic movement will be repressed for now, only to erupt again somewhere down the line.And more blood will be shed, just like it was when Americans fought and died to bring independence, democracy, and freedom to the United States. It's not something you can sit back and wait for someone to give to you voluntarily.

  Nien Cheng

  Women, Thinking, Blood

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• The cinema, like the detective story, makes it possible to experience without danger all the excitement, passion and desirousness which must be repressed in a humanitarian ordering of life.

  Carl Jung

  Passion, Cinema, Stories

  Carl Gustav Jung (2001). “Modern Man in Search of a Soul”, p.224, Psychology Press

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• Americans are a lot more open, of course. There's something more declamatory in the way you express emotions. It's a stereotype but it's true. British people can appear repressed in expressing emotions. Not very good at self-evaluating, or affirming situations, touching, anything like that.

  Emily Blunt

  Self, People, Touching

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• I would say to any artist: Don't be repressed in your work, dare to experiment, consider any urge, if in a new direction all the better.

  Edward Weston

  Artist, Photographer, Dare

  Edward Weston (1971). “Edward Weston: The Flame of Recognition: His Photographs Accompanied by Excerpts from the Daybooks & Letters”

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