#repression

There are many roles that people play and many images that they project. There is, for example, the "nice" man who is always smiling and agreeable. "Such a nice man," people say. "He never gets angry." The facade always covers its opposite expression. Inside, such a person is full of rage that he dares not acknowledge or show. Some men put up a tough exterior to hide a very sensitive, childlike quality. Even failure can be a role. Many masochistic characters engage in the game of failure to cover an inner feeling of superiority. An outward show of superiority could bring down on them the jealous wrath of the father and the threat of castration. As long as they act like failures they can retain some sexuality, since they are not a threat to her father. ↗

— Alexander Lowen

#childhood #fear #guilt #parenthood #repression

Repress the natural and it comes back even stronger: not everyone can be a fetishist ↗

— Philippe Lejeune

#repression #nature

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

— John Steinbeck

#strength #strength

The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them. ↗

— Karl Marx

#oppression #politics #representation #repression #society

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

#iran #prison-rape #rape #sexual-repression #sodomy

As soon as my trial was over, we tried to use the energy that had developed around my case to create another organization, which we called the National Alliance against Racist and Political Repression. ↗

— Angela Davis

#alliance #another #around #called #case

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

#age #been #between #classical #considerable

Love is a kind of symptom that arises through the repression of libido. ↗

— Frank Tallis

#desire #libido #love #psychology #repression

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

— Tahar Ben Jelloun

#bullets #discovered #i #injustice #real

When distinction of any kind, even intellectual distinction, is somehow resented as a betrayal of the American spirit of equal opportunity for all, the result must be just this terror of individualistic impulses setting us apart, either above or below our neighbours; just this determination to obey without questioning and to subscribe with passion to the conventions and traditions. The dilemma becomes a very real one: How can this sense of democratic equality be made compatible with respect for exceptional personalities or great minds? How can democracy, as we understand it today, with its iron repression of the free spirit, its monotonous standardisation of everything, learn to cherish an intellectual aristocracy without which any nation runs the risk of becoming a civilisation of the commonplace and the second-rate? ↗

— Harold Edmund Stearns

#civilization #conventions #distinction #equality #individualism