Boris Sidis Quotes

It is not the citizen, or a taxpayer, or voter, or office-holder, but the cultivated, free individual who is the true aim of all social progress.

Suggestibility varies as the amount of disaggregation, and inversely as the unification of consciousness.

Human institutions depend for their existence and stability on the impulse of self-preservation and its close associate, — the fear instinct.

A social aggregate which has chosen the fatal path of organic evolution must succumb to the same law of organic development to which all organisms are subject, namely greater and greater organization, increase of structure, greater differentiation, decrease of critical, personal, consciousness, loss of individual liberty, increased activity of the subconscious forces, falling into a state of somnambulism which can only be redeemed by revolution or by death.

The course of evolution is to a greater integration of similarly functioning ganglia.

The recognition, the diagnosis, and the preservation of psychopathic individuals account for the apparent increase of neurotics in civilized communities.

It is time that the medical and teaching profession should realize that functional neurosis is not congenital, not inborn, not hereditary, but is the result of a defective, fear-inspiring education in early child life.

Self-preservation is the central aim of all life-activities.

The fact that psychology postulates an external material world and studies it in so far as it comes to be reflected in consciousness, points to another postulate which psychology must assume in addition, namely, the existence of an inner world consciousness.

The general tendency of evolution is from structure to function, from bondage to freedom of the individual elements.

The psycho-physiological hypothesis is both inductively and deductively the sine qua non of the science of psychology.

Psychology is the science of psychic states both as to content and form, regarded from an objective standpoint, and brought in relation to the living corporeal individual.

The main source of psychopathic diseases is the fundamental instinct of fear with its manifestations, the feeling of anxiety, anguish, and worry.

No opinion should be disdained and scorned.

Mental synthesis of psychic content in the unity of a moment-consciousness is a fundamental principle of psychology.