“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.”

Extreme bigots are almost always super-patriots.

Since we think about ourselves so much of the time, it is comforting to assume … that we really know the score…. [But] this is not an easy assignment.

Love-incomparably the greatest psychotherapeutic agent-is something that professional psychiatry cannot of itself create, focus, nor release.

The specific goals we set for ourselves are almost always subsidiary to our long range intentions.

[As] Santayana wrote, ‘Nothing requires a rarer intellectual heroism than willingness to see one’s equation written out.’

Love received and love given comprise the best form of therapy.

From adolescence onward, however, the surest clue to personality is the hierarchy of interests, including the loves and loyalties of adult life.

There is a story of an Oxford student who once remarked, “I despise all Americans, but have never met one I didn’t like.”

The mature religious sentiment is ordinarily fashioned in the workshop of doubt.

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.

There’s a real sense in which MS and Apple never understood networking or operating systems (or what objects really are).

The real two-party system in America is the Meanies and the Weenies.

Some of it is carefully structured and well-thought-out. That’s where the real danger lies.

We need, in effect, to make the phantom ‘lock-boxes’ around the trust fund real.

It keeps interest rates lower than they otherwise would be and frees savings to finance increases in the capital stock, thereby boosting productivity and real incomes.

But the standard churchy spirituality doesn’t require any real action, courage, or sacrifice from its attendees.

All of it! – was held together by invisible chemical bonds, and I found a strange, inexplicable comfort in knowing that somewhere, even though we couldn’t see it in our own world, there was a real stability.

If you don’t have the background awareness of oneness, duality becomes real.