Quotes about Repression

The Stoics aspired to the repression of all emotion, and the Epicureans to freedom from all disturbance; yet in the upshot the one has become a synonym of stubborn endurance, the other for unbridled licence.

Hatreds not voiced, but which are concealed, is to be feared more than those openly declared.

But unshed tears can turn rancid. So can memory. So can biting your tongue. My bad nights were beginning. I couldn't sleep.

I'm probably just as good a mother as the next repressed, obsessive-compulsive paranoiac.

A society is always eager to cover misdeeds with a cloak of forgetfulness, but no society can fully repress an ugly past when the ravages persist into the present.

Repression, a degree of restraint, and a little dedication to self-editing belong to love just as surely as a capacity for explicit confession.

Society has taught us to suppress certain things and not do certain things.

Accompanied by a campaign against the Past; by the closing of museums, the blowing up of historical monuments (luckily most of them had already been destroyed during the Nine Years' War); by the suppression of all books published before A.F. 150.

But it's well known that repression makes a religion flourish.

If we don't pray according to the needs of the heart, we repress our deepest longings. Our prayers may not be rational, and we may be quite aware of that, but if we repress our needs, then those unsaid prayers will fester.

Little progress can be made by merely attempting to repress what is evil. Our great hope lies in developing what is good.

People hide their truest nature. I understood that; I even applauded it. What sort of world would it be if people bled all over the sidewalks, if they wept under trees, smacked whomever they despised, kissed strangers, revealed themselves?