[As] Santayana wrote, ‘Nothing requires a rarer intellectual heroism than willingness to see one’s equation written out.’
GORDON ALLPORT[As] Santayana wrote, ‘Nothing requires a rarer intellectual heroism than willingness to see one’s equation written out.’
GORDON ALLPORTA 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 ALLPORTThwarted lives have the most character-conditioned hate
GORDON ALLPORTIt 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.
GORDON ALLPORTGiven a thimbleful of [dramatic] facts we rush to make generalizations as large as a tub.
GORDON ALLPORTLove-incomparably the greatest psychotherapeutic agent-is something that professional psychiatry cannot of itself create, focus, nor release.
GORDON ALLPORTEach 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.
GORDON ALLPORTLife is too short so we must generalize.
GORDON ALLPORTAs partisans of our own way of life, we cannot help thinking in a partisan manner.
GORDON ALLPORTAn 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.
GORDON ALLPORTIt takes a major unhappiness, a prolonged and bitter experience, to drive us away from loyalties once formed.
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.
GORDON ALLPORTIf 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.
GORDON ALLPORTEach person is an idiom unto himself, an apparent violation of the syntax of the species.
GORDON ALLPORTSince 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 ALLPORTThe scientist, by the very nature of his commitment, creates more and more questions, never fewer.
GORDON ALLPORT