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)
GORDON ALLPORTMany studies have discovered a close link between prejudice and “patriotism” . . .
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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The mature religious sentiment is ordinarily fashioned in the workshop of doubt.
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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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Prejudgments become prejudices only if they are reversible when exposed to new knowledge.
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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.
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Thwarted lives have the most character-conditioned hate
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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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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.
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Reasoning discovers the true cause of our acts, rationalization finds good reasons for justifying our acts.
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And sometimes no amount of punishment can make us repudiate our loyalty.
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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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People who are aware of, and ashamed of, their prejudices are well on the road to eliminating them.
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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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It takes a major unhappiness, a prolonged and bitter experience, to drive us away from loyalties once formed.
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