„This may be the particular “neurotic personality of our time” – the neurotic pattern of contemporary “outer directed” organizational man.“

— Rollo May

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„If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.“
— Sylvia Plath
„A competent and self-confident person is incapable of jealousy in anything. Jealousy is invariably a symptom of neurotic insecurity.“
— Robert A. Heinlein
„… anyone who attempts to do both, to adjust to his group and at the same time pursue his individual goal, becomes neurotic.“
— C.G. Jung
„The true believer is in a high degree protected against the danger of certain neurotic afflictions, by accepting the universal neurosis he is spared the task of forming a personal neurosis.“
— Sigmund Freud
„Our patients are the ones who express and live out the subconscious and unconscious tendencies in the culture. The neurotic, or person suffering from what we now call character disorder, is characterized by the fact that the usual defenses of the culture do not work for him — a generally painful situation of which he is more or less aware…“
— Rollo May
„Freud describes the neurotic personality of the late nineteenth century as one suffering from fragmentation – that is, from repression of instinctual drives, blocking off of awareness, loss of autonomy, weakness and passivity of the ego, together with the various neurotic symptoms which result from this fragmentation. “Kierkegaard-who wrote the only known book before Freud specifically devoted to the problem of anxiety-analyzes not only anxiety but particularly the depression and despair which result from the individual’s self-estrangement, an estrangement he proceeds to clarify in its different forms and degrees of severity. Nietzsche proclaims ten years before Freud’s first book that the disease of contemporary man is that “his soul had gone stale” he is – he describes how blocked instinctual powers turn within the individual into resentment, self-hatred, hostility and aggression. Freud did not know Kierkegaard’s work, but he regarded Nietzsche as one of the authentically great men of all time.”“
— Rollo May