“Thwarted lives have the most character-conditioned hate”

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.

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

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.

You have to let go of all that to get to the other side. Most people aren’t willing to do that.

The most choice delicacies, prepared in the most scientific manner

So it is true that God dwells even in the most wicked, but it is not meet that we should associate with the wicked.

It’s odd that men feel they must protect women, since for the most part they must be protected from men.

The great fish swallow up the small; and he who is most strenuous for the rights of the people, when vested with power, is as eager after the prerogatives of government.

It is to me a most affecting thing to hear myself prayed for, in particular as I do every day in the week, and disposes me to bear with more composure

Trayvon Martin, at the most, seems only to have been guilty of being himself.

It’s always a problem when you’re working with people you don’t really know. Most filmmaking is about shaking hands and just starting.