138 Quotes About Repression

Now, however open a person manages to be, there is one possibility to which he remains as closed as ever: the possibility that when he uncovers his deepest anxieties he will find hidden inside them certain horrifying truths which his whole effort to control his life has been designed to keep repressed.

What we work so hard to avoid is the shattering of our lives by horrors we know we will be helpless to control.

Is is as if life or reality itself has had it in mind all along to unravel the very design i have been trying all along to impose on it.

When we operate on the basis of the will to control, we are aware of only one kind of "evil": the failure of existence to conform to the plan we have for it.

Your love for beauty has been perverted, repressed and savaged by hateful and controlling elements in the world.

The retreat into sameness—assimilation for those who can manage it—is the most passive and debilitating of responses to political repression, economic insecurity, and a renewed open season on difference.

Being in a state of denial is auniversally human response tosituations which threaten tooverwhelm. People who were abusedas children sometimes carry theirdenial like precious cargo without aport of destination. It enabled us tosurvive our childhood experiences, and often we still live in survival mode decades beyond the actual abuse. We protect ourselves to excess because we learned abruptly and painfully that no one else would.

The worst person to get away from is oneself.

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