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 ALLPORTBut there are innumerable instances in human life where a single association, never reinforced, results in the establishment of a life-long dynamic system.
More Gordon Allport Quotes
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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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The scientist, by the very nature of his commitment, creates more and more questions, never fewer.
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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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Personality is and does something…It is what lies behind specific acts and within the individual
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Extreme bigots are almost always super-patriots.
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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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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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[As] Santayana wrote, ‘Nothing requires a rarer intellectual heroism than willingness to see one’s equation written out.’
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Life is too short so we must generalize.
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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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As partisans of our own way of life, we cannot help thinking in a partisan manner.
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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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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 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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Given a thimbleful of [dramatic] facts we rush to make generalizations as large as a tub.
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And sometimes no amount of punishment can make us repudiate our loyalty.
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The mature religious sentiment is ordinarily fashioned in the workshop of doubt.
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Each person is an idiom unto himself, an apparent violation of the syntax of the species.
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Love-incomparably the greatest psychotherapeutic agent-is something that professional psychiatry cannot of itself create, focus, nor release.
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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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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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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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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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Many studies have discovered a close link between prejudice and “patriotism” . . .
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Prejudgments become prejudices only if they are not reversible when exposed to new knowledge.
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Love received and love given comprise the best form of therapy.
GORDON ALLPORT