Jordan Oates's Key Ideas from Civilization and Its Discontents
by Sigmund Freud

 "Our present ego-feeling is, therefore, only a shrunken residue of a much more inclusive—indeed, an all-embracing—feeling which corresponded to a more intimate bond between the ego and the world about it."

 "I cannot discover this 'oceanic feeling' in myself."

 "The intention that man should be 'happy' is not included in the plan of 'Creation'."

 "The replacement of the pleasure principle by the reality principle, this gradual transformation, is one of the most important events in the development of the ego."

 "Civilized man has exchanged a portion of his possibilities of happiness for a portion of security."

 "Men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness."

 "Civilization is constantly threatened with disintegration through this primary hostility of men against men."

 "The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance of their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction."

 "Aggression is internalized, it is sent back whence it came, i.e. it is directed towards the subject's own ego."

 "The super-ego retains the character of the father, while the more powerful the conscience becomes, the more severity the ego develops towards itself."

"Civilization, therefore, obtains mastery over the individual's dangerous desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it and by setting up inside it an agency to watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city."

"If civilization imposes such great sacrifices not only on man's sexuality but on his aggressivity as well, we can understand better why it is hard for him to be happy in that civilization."

 "Life, as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings us too much pain, disappointment and impossible tasks."

 "Love poses the problem for civilization; society can make no use of it."

 "Beauty, cleanliness and order obviously occupy a special position among the requirements of civilization."

 "Psychical order is only a projection of the outer order."

"The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization."

 "Guilt is the most important problem in the development of civilization."

 "Civilization behaves towards sexuality in the same way as a community or a great lord behaves towards the water supply; it looks after it, directs it and allows no one to make use of it without its permission."

 "The price we pay for our advance in civilization is a loss of happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt."

 "The psychic constitution of human beings refuses to be changed by the imposition of cultural demands."

 "The question of the purpose of human life has been raised countless times; it has never yet received a satisfactory answer and perhaps does not admit of one."

"If civilization is a necessary course of development from the family to humanity as a whole, then an intensification of the sense of guilt will be inseparably bound up with it."