Boris Sidis

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

— Boris Sidis

The principle of recognition of evil under all its guises is at the basis of the true education of man.

— Boris Sidis

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

— Boris Sidis

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

— Boris Sidis

Science is the description of phenomena and the formulation of their relations.

— Boris Sidis

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.

— Boris Sidis

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

— Boris Sidis

The man of genius whether as artist or thinker requires a mass of accidental variations to select from and a rigidly selective process of attention.

— Boris Sidis

Not purpose but chance is at the heart of mental life.

— Boris Sidis

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

Psychology must postulate uniformity of interrelation of physical, physiological, and psychic processes.

— Boris Sidis

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

— Boris Sidis

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

— Boris Sidis

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.

— Boris Sidis

No opinion should be disdained and scorned.

— Boris Sidis

If society is to progress on a truly humanistic basis, without being subject to mental epidemics and virulent social diseases to which the subconscious falls an easy victim, the personal consciousness of every individual should be cultivated to the highest degree possible.

— Boris Sidis

Greatness of individuality is inversely proportional to the mass of the social aggregate.

— Boris Sidis

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.

— Boris Sidis

If ceaseless vigilance is the price of liberty, more so is it true that ceaseless criticism of ever new opinions and ever new views, however distasteful, bizarre, and paradoxical, is the price of truth.

— Boris Sidis

The freedom of the seemingly false opinion and our tolerance of it and our willingness to meet with it in the open help test the validity of truth while keeping alive the critical sense which is the main spring of all advancement of human thought and is the vital point, the very soul, of all human progress.

— Boris Sidis

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

— Boris Sidis

The tendency of life is not the preservation of the species, but solely the preservation of each individual organism, as long as it is in existence at all, and is able to carry on its life processes.

— Boris Sidis

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

— Boris Sidis

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.

— Boris Sidis

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

— Boris Sidis