Despots play their part in the works of thinkers. Fettered words are terrible words. The writer doubles and trebles the power of his writing when a ruler imposes silence on the people. Something emerges from that enforced silence, a mysterious fullness which filters through and becomes steely in the thought. Repression in history leads to conciseness in the historian, and the rocklike hardness of much celebrated prose is due to the tempering of the tyrant.
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Sublimation of instinct is an especially conspicuous feature of cultural development; it is what makes it possible for higher psychical activities, scientific, artistic or ideological, to play such an important part in civilized life. If one were to yield to a first impression, one would say that sublimation is a vicissitude which has been forced upon the instincts entirely by civilization. But it would be wiser to reflect upon this a little longer. In the third place, finally, and this seems the most important of all, it is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct, how much it presupposes precisely the non-satisfaction (by suppression, repression or some other means?) of powerful instincts. This ââ?¬Ë?cultural frustrationââ?¬â?¢ dominates the large field of social relationships between human beings;we know already that it is the cause of the antagonism against which all civilization has to fight.
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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.
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Our knowledge of the historical worth of certain religious doctrines increases our respect for them, but does not invalidate our proposal that they should cease to be put forward as the reasons for the precepts of civilization. On the contrary! Those historical residues have helped us to view religious teachings, as it were, as neurotic relics, and we may now argue that the time has probably come, as it does in an analytic treatment, for replacing the effects of repression by the results of the rational operation of the intellect.
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I have been gratified by the clear determination expressed by NATO and its member governments to prevent a further escalation of the fighting, and I encourage all steps that may deter the further use of ethnically driven repression and the resort to violence by either side in Kosovo,
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We were that generation called silent, but we were silent neither, as some thought, because we shared the period's official optimism nor, as others thought, because we feared its official repression. We were silent because the exhilaration of social action seemed to many of us just one more way of escaping the personal, of masking for a while that dread of the meaningless which was man's fate.
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an important staging post on the journey of the people of Iraq toward a new future, one in which democracy replaces dictatorship, in which freedom replaces repression, and in which all the people of Iraq can look forward to the possibility and the hope of an Iraq that genuinely guarantees a future for people from whatever part of Iraq they come.
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When you look at organized religion of whatever sort whether it's Christianity in all its variants, or whether it's Islam or some forms of extreme Hinduism wherever you see organized religion and priesthoods and power, you see cruelty and tyranny and repression. It's almost a universal law.
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a very strong endorsement... of the basic objectives established (by the 19-nation NATO alliance) ... to stop the repression in Kosovo.
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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.
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Reason has never failed men. Only force and repression have made the wrecks in the world.
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The policy of repression of ideas cannot work and never has worked.
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