Havelock Ellis
Havelock Ellis
Henry Havelock Ellis, known as Havelock Ellis, was an English physician, writer, progressive intellectual and social reformer who studied human sexuality. He was co-author of the first medical textbook in English on homosexuality in 1897, and also published works on a variety of sexual practices and inclinations, as well as transgender psychology. He is credited with introducing the notions of narcissism and autoeroticism, later adopted by psychoanalysis. He served as president of the Galton Institute and, like many intellectuals of...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionPsychologist
Date of Birth2 February 1859
Life is livable because we know that whatever we go most of the people we meet will be restrained in their actions towards us by an almost instinctive network of taboos
Thinking in its lower grades is comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry
The sun, the moon and the stars would have disappeared long ago, had they happened to be within reach of predatory human hands
When love is suppressed hate takes its place.
Had there been a Lunatic Asylum in the suburbs of Jerusalem, Jesus Christ would infallibly have been shut up in it at the outset of his public career. That interview with Satan on a pinnacle of the Temple would alone have damned him, and everything that happened after could have confirmed the diagnosis. The whole religious complexion of the modern world is due to the absence from Jerusalem of a Lunatic Asylum.
What we call 'morals' is simply blind obedience to words of command.
There is nothing that war has ever achieved that we could not better achieve without it.
Socialism also brings us up against the hard rock of eugenic fact which, if we neglect it, will dash our most beautiful social construction to fragments.
The place where optimism most flourishes is the lunatic asylum.
However well organized the foundations of life may be, life must always be full of risks.
Sex lies at the root of life, and we can never learn to reverence life until we know how to understand sex.
All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution.
For every fresh stage in our lives we need a fresh education, and there is no stage for which so little educational preparation is made as that which follows the reproductive period.
The sun, the moon and the stars would have disappeared long ago... had they happened to be within the reach of predatory human hands.