"Human institutions depend for their existence and stability on the impulse of self-preservation and its close associate, — the fear instinct."
Boris Sidis was an American psychopathologist, psychologist, physician, psychiatrist, and philosopher of education. Sidis founded the New York State Psychopathic Institute and the Journal of Abnormal Psychology. He was the father of child prodigy William James Sidis. Boris Sidis eventually opposed mainstream psychology and Sigmund Freud, and thereby died ostracized. He was married to a maternal au
"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."
Boris Sidis"Suggestibility varies as the amount of disaggregation, and inversely as the unification of consciousness."
Boris Sidis"Not purpose but chance is at the heart of mental life."
Boris Sidis"Science is the description of phenomena and the formulation of their relations."
Boris Sidis"The general tendency of evolution is from structure to function, from bondage to freedom of the individual elements."
Boris Sidis"The principle of recognition of evil under all its guises is at the basis of the true education of man."
Boris Sidis"I should say that when people talk about capitalism its a bit of a joke. Theres no such thing. No country, no business class, has ever been willing to subject itself to the free market, free market discipline. Free markets are for others. Like, the Third World is the Third World because they had free markets rammed down their throat. Meanwhile, the enlightened states, England, the United States, others, resorted to massive state intervention to protect private power, and still do. Thats right up to the present. I mean, the Reagan administration for example was the most protectionist in post-war American history. Virtually the entire dynamic economy in the United States is based crucially on state initiative and intervention: computers, the internet, telecommunication, automation, pharmaceutical, you just name it. Run through it, and you find massive ripoffs of the public, meaning, a system in which under one guise or another the public pays the costs and takes the risks, and profit is privatized. Thats very remote from a free market. Free market is like what India had to suffer for a couple hundred years, and most of the rest of the Third World."
"He, who begins by loving Christianity better than Truth, will proceed by loving his own Sect or Church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all."
Samuel Taylor Coleridge"I believe that the unity of man as opposed to other living things derives from the fact that man is the conscious life of himself. Man is conscious of himself, of his future, which is death, of his smallness, of his impotence; he is aware of others as others; man is in nature, subject to its laws even if he transcends it with his thought."
Erich Fromm"You cant manage yourself, Root. How do you expect to manage others?"
"Do not try to make the brilliant pupil a replica of yourself."
"I believe that man is in the last resort so free a being that his right to be what he believes himself to be cannot be contested."