Independent thought

“If we wished to analyze how much in all our own concepts and imagination is ours, and how much is socially suggested, the analysis would perhaps have a discouraging result. The independent thinker too would become aware with shame how like he is to the sponge that has sucked itself full of water; for in just the same way his own ideas, images, and concepts are suggested to him by his social surroundings.” (Ludwig Gumplowicz, The Sociological Idea of the State, 1902, cited in Martin Green, 1999, Otto Gross: Freudian Psychoanalyst 1877-1920.)