Prejudgments become prejudices only if they are reversible when exposed to new knowledge.
GORDON ALLPORTAs partisans of our own way of life, we cannot help thinking in a partisan manner.
More Gordon Allport Quotes
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There is a story of an Oxford student who once remarked, “I despise all Americans, but have never met one I didn’t like.”
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But there are innumerable instances in human life where a single association, never reinforced, results in the establishment of a life-long dynamic system.
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Prejudgments become prejudices only if they are not reversible when exposed to new knowledge.
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Each must find out for himself, and must accept the responsibility that his answer prescribes. If he succeeds he will continue to grow in spite of all indignities.
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It takes a major unhappiness, a prolonged and bitter experience, to drive us away from loyalties once formed.
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As partisans of our own way of life, we cannot help thinking in a partisan manner.
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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)
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[As] Santayana wrote, ‘Nothing requires a rarer intellectual heroism than willingness to see one’s equation written out.’
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Indeed the measure of our intellectual maturity, one philosopher suggests, is our capacity to feel less and less satisfied with our answers to better problems.
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We cannot know the young child’s personality by studying his systems of interest, for his attention is as yet too labile, his reactions impulsive, and interests unformed.
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The mature religious sentiment is ordinarily fashioned in the workshop of doubt.
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Extreme bigots are almost always super-patriots.
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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.
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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.
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Thwarted lives have the most character-conditioned hate
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It is not that we have class prejudice, but only that we find comfort and ease in our own class. And normally there are plenty of people of our own class, or race, or religion to play, live, and eat with, and to marry.
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Reasoning discovers the true cause of our acts, rationalization finds good reasons for justifying our acts.
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The specific goals we set for ourselves are almost always subsidiary to our long range intentions.
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The theist is persuaded that while nothing that contradicts science is likely to be true, still nothing that stops with science can be the whole truth.
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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?
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An experience associated only once with a bereavement, an accident, or a battle, may become the center of a permanent phobia or complex, not in the least dependent on a recurrence of the original shock.
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From adolescence onward, however, the surest clue to personality is the hierarchy of interests, including the loves and loyalties of adult life.
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Open-mindedness is considered to be a virtue. But, strictly speaking, it cannot occur.
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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.
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People who are aware of, and ashamed of, their prejudices are well on the road to eliminating them.
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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.
GORDON ALLPORT