“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.

The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.

See, behind all my tough, rough exterior is basically a marshmallow, maybe a pussycat. But not a wimp!

Every heart that has beat strongly and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind.

We will win an election when all the seats in the House and Senate and the chair behind the desk in the Oval Office and the whole bench of the Supreme Court are filled with people who wish they weren’t there.

Phil Niekro and his brother were pitching against each other in Atlanta. Their parents were sitting right behind home plate.

The only time it dominates is during a solo, or when we play a low blues and I put figures in behind Eric’s vocals.

Blow the dust off the clock. Your watches are behind the times. Throw open the heavy curtains which are so dear to you – you do not even suspect that the day has already dawned outside.

The importance of local governance may not be obvious to an America accustomed to treating city and state downfalls with doses of federal comeuppance. Sometimes there’s a reason for that – the Civil War. More often, all reasoning seems absent – No Child Left Behind.