» The ego is not master in its own house.
» America is a mistake, a giant mistake.
» America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success.
» The tendency of aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual disposition in man... it constitutes the most powerful obstacle to culture.
» No one who has seen a baby sinking back satiated from the breast and falling asleep with flushed cheeks and a blissful smile can escape the reflection that this picture persists as a prototype of the expression of sexual satisfaction in later life.
» Devout believers are safeguarded in a high degree against the risk of certain neurotic illnesses; their acceptance of the universal neurosis spares them the task of constructing a personal one.
» The act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety.
» The only bodily organ which is really regarded as inferior is the atrophied penis, a girl's clitoris.
» Children are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them.
» Civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind. Why this has to happen, we do not know; the work of Eros is precisely this.