Civilization and Its Discontents

by Sigmund Freud

Sexual abstinence (while it may be useful for ‘young scholars …’), far from producing great artists or ‘independent men of action or original thinkers, bold liberators and reformers’, will ‘more often … produce well-behaved weaklings who later merge into the great mass of those who habitually, if reluctantly, follow the lead given by strong [that is, strongly sexed?] individuals’ (p. 98).