“Personality is and does something…It is what lies behind specific acts and within the individual”

The dog [in Pavlov’s experiments] does not continue to salivate whenever it hears a bell unless sometimes at least an edible offering accompanies the bell.

A good parent, a good neighbour, a good citizen, is not good because his specific goals are acceptable, but because his successive goals are ordered to a dependable and socially desirable set of values. (1947)

As partisans of our own way of life, we cannot help thinking in a partisan manner.

And sometimes no amount of punishment can make us repudiate our loyalty.

But there are innumerable instances in human life where a single association, never reinforced, results in the establishment of a life-long dynamic system.

If a person is capable of rectifying his erroneous judgments in the light of new evidence he is not prejudiced.

The outlines of the needed psychology of becoming can be discovered by looking within ourselves; for it is knowledge of our own uniqueness that supplies the first, and probably the best, hints for acquiring orderly knowledge of others.

Given a thimbleful of [dramatic] facts we rush to make generalizations as large as a tub.

Thwarted lives have the most character-conditioned hate

Prejudgments become prejudices only if they are reversible when exposed to new knowledge.

Reason adapts impulses and beliefs into the real world; rationalization, on the other hand, adapts the concept of reality to the impulses and beliefs of the individual.

A new experience must be redacted into old categories. We cannot handle each event freshly in its own right. If we did so, of what use would past experience be?

Many studies have discovered a close link between prejudice and “patriotism” . . .

If there is a purpose in life at all, there must be a purpose in suffering and in dying. But no man can tell another what this purpose is.

Each person is an idiom unto himself, an apparent violation of the syntax of the species.

Reasoning discovers the true cause of our acts, rationalization finds good reasons for justifying our acts.

There are borderlines and there are borderlines. Labels do violence to people. You can’t treat the label; you have to treat the person behind the label. (17)

The enemy is in front of us, the enemy is behind us, the enemy is to the right and to the left of us. They can’t get away this time!

The Liberal State is a mask behind which there is no face; it is a scaffolding behind which there is no building.

The mask was a thing on it’s own, behind which Jack hid, liberated from shame and self-conciousness.

Climbing the economic ladder has been very hard for me; I still feel a great deal of guilt towards those I left behind.

The Jewish spirit, which was responsible for the alliance of large-scale capital with Marxism and was the driving force behind so many anti-Spanish revolutionary agreements, will not be got rid of in a day.

I’m eighteen years behind in my ironing. There’s no use doing it now, it doesn’t fit anybody I know.

For me, I say no, but then I am old, and life, with his sunshine, his fair places, his song of birds, his music and his love, lie far behind. You others are young. Some have seen sorrow, but there are fair days yet in store. What say you?