If the fire rages uncontrolled in a house, we call it a disastrous conflagration; if it burns in a smelting furnace, we call it a useful industrial force. In other words, our drives and impulses as they live within us are neither good nor bad, right nor wrong.

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) Austrian psychoanalyst and neurologist

(Attributed)

Quoted in Helen Walker Puner, Freud: His Life and His Mind, ch. 10 (1947).