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When blended with sexuality, the death instinct is transformed into more harmless impulses expressed in sadism or masochism. -- Erich Fromm
the anxiety arising from the perpetual activity of the death instinct, though never eliminated, is counteracted and kept at bay by the power of the life instinct. -- Melanie Klein
Only time will tell in what ways Freud was prescient and in what ways he failed to understand how the mind functions. For example, no scientist and very few psychoanalysts still embrace Freud's death instinct. -- Siri Hustvedt
Since the death instinct exists in the heart of everything that lives, since we suffer from trying to repress it, since everything that lives longs for rest, let us unfasten the ties that bind us to life, let us cultivate our death wish, let us develop it, water it like a plant, let it grow unhindered. Suffering and fear are born from the repression of the death wish. -- Eugene Ionesco
But death's acquisitive instincts will win. -- Harold Brodkey
An insatiable appetite for glory leads to sacrifice and death, but innate instinct leads to self-preservation and life. -- Jose Marti
Feminists bore me to death. I follow my instinct and if that supports young girls in any way, great. But I'd rather they saw it more as a lesson about following their own instincts rather than imitating somebody. -- Bjork
I had seen cancer at a more cellular level as a researcher. The first time I entered the cancer ward, my first instinct was to withdraw from what was going on - the complexity, the death. It was a very bleak time. -- Siddhartha Mukherjee
For centuries the death penalty, often accompanied by barbarous refinements, has been trying to hold crime in check; yet crime persists. Why? Because the instincts that are warring in man are not, as the law claims, constant forces in a state of equilibrium. -- Albert Camus
A dislike of death is no proof of the want of religion. The instincts of nature shrink from it, for no creature can like its own dissolution. But though death is not desired, the result of it may be, for dying to the Christian is the way to life eternal. -- William Jay
The whole life of instinct serves the one end of bringing about death. -- Sigmund Freud
There is within us a moral instinct which forbids us to rejoice at the death of even an enemy. -- Henryk Sienkiewicz
The death sentence is a barbaric act . . . It is a reflection of the animal instinct still in human beings. -- Nelson Mandela

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