“To the extent that one is responsible for one’s life, one is alone.”

It is wrong to bear children out of need, wrong to use a child to alleviate loneliness, wrong to provide purpose in life by reproducing another copy of oneself. It is wrong also to seek immortality by spewing one’s germ into the future as though sperm contains your consciousness!

If one is to love oneself one must behave in ways that one can admire.

If you want to choose the pleasure of growth, prepare yourself for some pain.

When people don’t have any curiosity about themselves, that is always a bad sign.

Life as a therapist is a life of service in which we daily transcend our personal wishes and turn our gaze toward the needs and growth of the other.

Live right, he reminded himself, and have faith that good things will flow from you even if you never learn of them.

When that person dies, the whole cluster dies,too, vanishes from the living memory. I wonder who that person will be for me. Whose death will make me truly dead?

The therapist can make the group feel safer by allowing each patient to set his or her limits and by emphasizing the patient’s control over every interaction.

Despair is the price one pays for self-awareness. Look deeply into life, and you’ll always find despair.

You know, I think everybody I’ve seen has come from some other therapy, and almost invariably it’s very much the same thing: the therapist is too disinterested, a little too aloof, a little too inactive. They’re not really interested in the person, he doesn’t relate to the person.

Psychiatry is a strange field because, unlike any other field of medicine, you never really finish.

Some sort of greater awareness of their own finiteness and what their time on earth really is, and what they really want to do with their lives, could help improve them.

Never take away anything if you have nothing better to offer

Despite the staunchest, most venerable defenses, we can never completely subdue death anxiety: it is always there, lurking in some hidden ravine of the mind.

We take pleasure not only in the growth of our patient but also in the ripple effect—the salutary influence our patients have upon those whom they touch in life.

The path to decision may be hard because it leads into the territory of both finiteness and groundlessness—domains soaked in anxiety.

I think most defense attorneys know, to some extent, their clients are guilty.

We pardon to the extent that we love.

Everybody is xenophobic to an extent.

And to the extent that we do not violate any known laws of the universe, we can probably make it work the way that we want to.

To the extent that President Trump means strengthened border security, I am fully in favor of the idea that the rule of the law, secure borders and public safety should prevail. Drugs should not enter illegally.

I dont think just scaring people is enough. That worked during the freeze days to a major extent, but we really didnt achieve that much even at that time.

So, half a dozen of us tried – not all of us in history – and we all eventually got in. So, to that extent, it [The History Boys] comes out of my own experience.

The highest measure of democracy is neither the ‘extent of freedom’ nor the ‘extent of equality’, but rather the highest measure of participation.