Suppression

Suppression refers to putting an end to, especially with force, or doing away with; prohibiting, subduing. It may also refer to restraining or repressing, such as laughter or an expression.

Quotes

• When intellectual formulations are treated simply by relegating them to the past and permitting the simple passage of time to substitute for development, the suspicion is justified that such formulations have not really been mastered, but rather they are being suppressed.
  • Theodor Adorno, quoted in: Michael Bull (2000) Sounding Out the City, p. 1

• I saw in the Soviet Union many opponents of the regime. I visited a dozen prisons — the political sections among them. I saw considerable of the work of the OGPU. I heard a good many stories of severity, even of brutality, and many of them from the victims. While I sympathized with personal distress I just could not bring myself to get excited over the suppression of opposition when I stacked it up against what I saw of fresh, vigorous expressions of free living by workers and peasants all over the land. And further, no champion of a socialist society could fail to see that some suppression was necessary to achieve it. It could not all be done by persuasion.
  • Roger Nash Baldwin. "Freedom In the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R." Soviet Russia Today, September 1934.

• Let us put aside resolutely that great fright, tenderly and without malice, daring to be wrong in something important rather than right in some meticulous banality, fearing no evil while the mind is free to search, imagine, and conclude, inviting our countrymen to try other instruments than coercion and suppression in the effort to meet destiny with triumph, genially suspecting that no creed yet calendared in the annals of politics mirrors the doomful possibilities of infinity.
  • Charles A. Beard Presidential address to the American Political Science Association at St. Louis, Mo., December 29, 1926[1]: "Time, Technology, and the Creative Spirit in Political Science", The American Political Science Review 21 (1), (February 1927) p. 11.

• This is what makes people in this country wary of Islam in many of its forms, in one place or another: the centrality and inescapability of religion, the loss of freedom of thought and expression, the harshness of sharia (Islamic law), the patriarchal suppression of women, including their inequality under sharia, the medieval punishments for apostasy, adultery and even theft, the insistence on a cruel form of animal slaughter, the violence and anti-Semitism of many sacred texts, the disinclination to integrate with the host culture and finally one can argue the incompatibility of theocratic Islam with democracy. To find all those things alarming as possibilities is not to be Islamophobic or racist. It is to be reasonable from a western point of view.
  • Minette Marrin "It's not a phobia – it's rational to fear Islam" at richarddawkins.net, 23 January 2011

• If we designate as intelligence, quantitatively, the total of mental functioning, it is evident that the suppression of verbal thought involves a defect, relatively very important among cultivated individuals leading a complex social life: the uneducated person from this point of view is a defective.
  • Henri Piéron Le cerveau et la pensée [Thought and the Brain] (1923)

• The suppression of natural sexual gratification leads to various kinds of substitute gratifications. Natural aggression, for example, becomes brutal sadism which then is an essential mass-psychological factor in imperialistic wars.
  • Wilhelm Reich The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933) Ch. 1 : Ideology As Material Power, Section 4 : The Social Function of Sexual Suppression

• God Almighty has set before me two great objects: the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners.
  • William Wilberforce in: C. MacFarlane & T. Thomson. (1792), The comprehensive history of England, from the earliest period to the suppression of the Sepoy revolt, page 752.