47 Quotes About Suppression

Some people can’t handle the hard work it takes to change their lives, so they try to live with the same old habits and behaviors that got them into this situation in the first place. It’s not easy to change your life if you’re not committed to doing the work. Sometimes we feel like we’re alone in our struggles, but having resources like these quotes about suppression can help you get past your pain and start living the life you want.

And the truth must finally lie in that which every...
1
And the truth must finally lie in that which every oppressed individual feels within himself but hasn't the courage to express Wilhelm Reich
Tension, in the long run, is a more dangerous force...
2
Tension, in the long run, is a more dangerous force than any feud known to man. Criss Jami
3
Not all men (and especially the wisest) share the opinion that it is bad for women to be educated. But it is very true that many foolish men have claimed this because it displeased them that women knew more than they did. Christine De Pizan
Social media allows us to subjugate feelings and problems we...
4
Social media allows us to subjugate feelings and problems we don't want to confront, like emotional eating or substance abuse, thus perpetuating our problems and delaying our happiness. Sam Owen
Many obese people spend a significant amount of their energy...
5
Many obese people spend a significant amount of their energy on suppressing the urge to tell some of the people who are staring at them that they do not eat as much and as frequently as they seem to. Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Poems are difficult to silence.
6
Poems are difficult to silence. Stephen Greenblatt
There have been times I've felt so much art in...
7
There have been times I've felt so much art in my soul I grew sick of artists. Criss Jami
8
When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman. Virginia Woolf
9
Was not Hypatia the greatest philosopher of Alexandria, and a true martyr to the old values of learning? She was torn to pieces by a mob of incensed Christians not because she was a woman, but because her learning was so profound, her skills at dialectic so extensive that she reduced all who queried her to embarrassed silence. They could not argue with her, so they murdered her. Iain Pears
Truth is the preferred weapon of God, and censorship is...
10
Truth is the preferred weapon of God, and censorship is the most abused tool of the Devil. Suzy Kassem
11
It is among the commonplaces of education that we often first cut off the living root and then try to replace its natural functions by artificial means. Thus we suppress the child's curiosity and then when he lacks a natural interest in learning he is offered special coaching for his scholastic coaching for his scholastic difficulties. Alice Duer Miller
12
All right, all right, " he said, with that gesture I'd come to hate: two open palms facing me and patting the air, as if pushing me away, pushing me down, pushing any tears I might be preparing to cry back into their ducts. Kathleen Rooney
13
Yet if women are so flighty, fickle, changeable, susceptible, and inconstant (as some clerks would have us believe), why is it that their suitors have to resort to such trickery to have their way with them? And why don't women quickly succumb to them, without the need for all this skill and ingenuity in conquering them? For there is no need to go to war for a castle that is already captured. Christine De Pizan
Men know that women are an overmatch for them, and...
14
Men know that women are an overmatch for them, and therefore they choose the weakest or the most ignorant. If they did not think so, they never could be afraid of women knowing as much as themselves. Samuel Johnson
15
The most effective weapon a parent has to control a child is the withdrawal of love or its threat. A young child between the ages of three and six is too dependent on parental love and approval to resist this pressure. Robert's mother, as we saw earlier, controlled him by "cutting him out." Margaret's mother beat her into submission, but it was the loss of her father's love that devastated her. Whatever the means parents use, the result is that the child is forced to give up his instinctual longing, to suppress his sexual desires for one parent and his hostility toward the other. In their place he will develop feelings of guilt about his sexuality and fear of authority figures. This surrender constitutes an acceptance of parental power and authority and a submission to the parents' values and demands. The child becomes "good", which means that he gives up his sexual orientation in favor of one directed toward achievement. Parental authority is introjected in the form of a superego, ensuring that the child will follow his parents' wishes in the acculturation process. In effect, the child now identifies with the threatening parent. Freud says, "The whole process, on the one hand, preserves the genital organ wards off the danger of losing it; on the other hand, it paralyzes it, takes its function away from it. . Alexander Lowen
16
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
17
He wants me to tell him about the front; he is curious in a way that I find stupid and distressing; I no longer have any real contact with him. There is nothing he likes more than just hearing about it. I realize he does not know that a man cannot talk of such things; I would do it willingly, but it is too dangerous for me to put these things into words. I am afraid they might then become gigantic and I be no longer able to master them. What would become of us if everything that happens out there were quite clear to us? . Erich Maria Remarque
... how terrible is the pain of the mind and...
18
... how terrible is the pain of the mind and heart when the freedom of mankind is suppressed! E.a. Bucchianeri
19
[M]en, though they know full well how much women are worth and how great the benefits we bring them, nonetheless seek to destroy us out of envy for our merits. It's just like the crow, when it produces white nestlings: it is so stricken by envy, knowing how black it is itself, that it kills its own offspring out of pique. Moderata Fonte
20
Chastity ... has, even now, a religious importance in a woman's life, and has so wrapped itself round with nerves and instincts that to cut it free and bring it to the light of day demands courage of the rarest. Virginia Woolf
21
The present representative of the Dedlocks is an excellent master. He supposes all his dependents to be utterly bereft of individual characters, intentions, or opinions, and is persuaded that he was born to supersede the necessity of their having any. If he were to make a discovery to the contrary, he would be simply stunned – would never recover himself, most likely, except to gasp and die. Charles Dickens
22
It takes courage and strength to be sensitive to things and even more strength and courage to own up to it or be vocal about it. Robots, the only things with a perfect lack of emotional capacity, are easily controlled, and I suddenly realized that’s why the military often trains people to suppress their emotions. Unfortunately for them, humans aren't machines. We feel, we love, we cry, we despair, and we rejoice. Anyone who’s ever tried to convince me not to feel is someone I shouldn’t have trusted. The only reason you should shut off your emotions and emulate a robot is if you're doing horrible things. How fatal my decisions have been. How many people would be loving, rejoicing, and feeling right now rather than crying indefinitely in the depths of the afterlife? If only I’d figured this out sooner. Bruce Crown
23
It is a terrible error to let any natural impulse, physical or mental, stagnate. Crush it out, if you will, and be done with it; or fulfil it, and get it out of the system; but do not allow it to remain there and putrefy. The suppression of the normal sex instinct, for example, is responsible for a thousand ills. In Puritan countries one inevitably finds a morbid preoccupation with sex coupled with every form of perversion and degeneracy. . Aleister Crowley
24
While the repression of a memory is a psychological process, the suppression of feeling is accomplished by deadening a part of the body or reducing its motility so that feeling is diminished. The repression of the memory is dependent upon and related to the suppression of feeling, for as long as the feeling persists, the memory remains vivid. Suppression entails the development of chronic muscular tension in those areas of the body where the feeling would be experienced. In the case of sexual feeling, this tension is found in and about the abdomen and pelvis. Alexander Lowen
25
All children are curious and I wonder by what process this trait becomes developed in some and suppressed in others. I suspect again that schools and colleges help in the suppression insofar as they meet curiosity by giving the answers, rather than by some method that leads from narrower questions to broader questions. It is hard to satisfy the curiosity of a child, and even harder to satisfy the curiosity of a scientist, and methods that meet curiosity with satisfaction are thus not apt to foster the development of the child into the scientist. I don't advocate turning all children into professional scientists, although I think there would be advantages if all adults retained something of the questioning attitude, if their curiosity were less easily satisfied by dogma, of whatever variety. . Marston Bates
26
A society that gets rid of all its troublemakers goes downhill. Robert A. Heinlein
27
Suppression of love or hatred creates conflict. Bryant McGill
28
I want all the books on the she E.L. Konigsburg
29
When you suppress your darkness you also suppress your light. Bryant McGill
30
Self-hatred is self-imprisonment. Self-forgiveness is self-liberation. You have the right to suppress yourself, oppress yourself and depress yourself. You have the right to impress yourself too. Feel happy! Israelmore Ayivor
31
His suppressed grief becomes anger. But what can he do with anger? It must also be suppressed. Hilary Mantel
32
Do well to impress; don't depress, suppress or oppress anyone. Inspire a soul; never despise! Israelmore Ayivor
33
We live in truly unbelievable times. Autism is an epidemic in most westerncountries, western governments are nothing more than corrupt corporations, and corporations areroutinely suppressing information regarding the toxicity of many common household items. The resultis that many people are unnecessarily suffering from easily preventable developmental problems, sickness and cancer. Steven Magee
34
There's nothing we fear more than our own Reflection. We scream at the monsters within us, hidden deep within our hearts. We run and hide from the terrors all around us- the different mirrors that we see. Solange Nicole
35
People tend to suppress that which they cannot express. YiFu Tuan
36
Never try to discourage thinking, for you are sure to succeed. Bertrand Russell
37
Above all, it seems to me wrongheaded and dangerous to invoke historical assumptions about environmental practices of native peoples in order to justify treating them fairly.. By invoking this assumption [i.e., that they were/are better environmental stewards than other peoples or parts of contemporary society] to justify fair treatment of native peoples, we imply that it would be OK to mistreat them if that assumption could be refuted. In fact, the case against mistreating them isn't based on any historical assumption about their environmental practices: it's based on a moral principle, namely, that it is morally wrong for one people to dispossess, subjugate or exterminate another people. Jared Diamond
38
They let us be, here, in the cage of our ignorance. Unknown
39
All pain in life comes from suppressing your true identity. Bryant McGill
40
Trying to erase, hide, discredit, degrade, and suppress a writer's work, merit, voice, and influence―is unconstitutional. Censorship only exists to protect corruption. Suzy Kassem
41
Every man – in the development of his own personality – has the right to form his own beliefs and opinions. Hence, suppression of belief, opinion and expression is an affront to the dignity of man, a negation of man’s essential na Thomas I. Emerson
42
Thus we arrive at the problem of the relation of religion to the negation of sexual desire. Sexual debility results in a lowering of self-confidence. In one case it is compensated by the brutalization of sexuality, to maintain sexual repression, in the other by rigid character traits. The compulsion to control one's sexuality, to maintain sexual repression, leads to the development of pathologic, emotionally tinged notions of honor and duty, bravery and self-control. But the pathology and emotionality of these psychic attitudes are strongly at variance with the reality of one's personal behavior. The man who attains genital satisfaction, is honorable, responsible, brave, and controlled, without making much of a fuss about it. These attitudes are an organic part of his personality. The man whose genitals are weakened, whose sexual structure is full of contradictions, must continually remind himself to control his sexuality, to preserve his sexual dignity, to be brave in the face of temptation, etc. The struggle to resist the temptation to masturbate is a struggle that is experienced by every adolescent and every child, without exception. All the elements of the reactionary man's structure are developed in this struggle. It is in the lower middle classes that this structure is reinforced most strongly and embedded most deeply. Every form of mysticism derives it's most active energy and, in part, also it's content from this compulsory suppression of sexuality. Wilhelm Reich
43
As long as you keep secrets and suppress information, you are fundamentally at war with yourself… The critical issue is allowing yourself to know what you know. That takes an enormous amount of courage. Unknown
44
What then did you expect when you unbound the gag that muted those black mouths? That they would chant your praises? Did you think that when those heads that our fathers had forcibly bowed down to the ground were raised again, you would find adoration in their eyes? JeanPaul Sartre
45
But laugh?" He pressed the flat of his hand against my stomach. "Here lives laugh." He ran his finger straight up to my mouth and spread his fingers. "Push back laugh is not good. Not healthy."" Also cry?" I asked. I traced an imaginary tear down my cheek with one finger." Also cry." He put his hand on his own belly. "Ha ha ha, " he said, pressing his hand to show me the motion of his stomach. Then his expression changed to sad. "Huh huh huh, " he heaved with exaggerated sobs, pressing his stomach again. "Same place. Not healthy to push down. . Patrick Rothfuss
46
Obligation is a more effective weapon against the Will than any penalty, threat or act of force. Ashim Shanker