“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.”

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 scientist, by the very nature of his commitment, creates more and more questions, never fewer.

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.

It takes a major unhappiness, a prolonged and bitter experience, to drive us away from loyalties once formed.

Open-mindedness is considered to be a virtue. But, strictly speaking, it cannot occur.

Prejudgments become prejudices only if they are not reversible when exposed to new knowledge.

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.

Life is too short so we must generalize.

The circumference of life cannot be rightly drawn until the center is set.

If God is not at the center of your life, something else is.

Find your center and stay there.

We’re talking about a world where the PC is no longer the center, but just a devicewhere your new devices need to be more portable, more personal.

I was at Rutgers University, and that was a center for Fluxus in a way. But it wasn’t what I was interested in.

All these financiers, all the little gnomes of Zürich and the other financial centres, about whom we keep on hearing.

I think I’m the only player who looks at each and every center and says to myself, ‘That’s barbecued chicken down there.’

There is in the universe neither center nor circumference.