Can anyone give me any specifics on this quote:"I have found little that is good about human beings. In my experience most of them, on the whole, are trash." - Sigmund Freud Any time, place, circumstance, page in book, etc., will be appreciated. Thank you!
It's been quite awhile, but I think it might be from "The Future of an Illusion". BTW, my favorite Freud quote: "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar". Bruce
I know nothing about this, but web search suggests it was in a letter to Oskar Pfister published in: Psychoanalysis and Faith: The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Oskar Pfister, eds. Heinrich Meng and Ernst L. Freud, trans. by Eric Mosbacher. New York: Basic Books, 1963 (or elsewhere I saw 1964). "I have found little that is 'good' about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all. That is something you can not say aloud, or perhaps even think, though your experience of life can hardly have been different than mine. If we are to talk of ethics, I subscribe to a high ideal from which most of the human beings I have come across depart most lamentably."
Jimmy, I have found, to my delight, that Google works as a quotation finder (along with everything else). I pasted the quote in, and up came hundreds of references and citations and full text and so forth. --John ----------- "I have found little that is good about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all" (Veritas Reconsidered, p. 36).
