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 ALLPORTThere is a story of an Oxford student who once remarked, “I despise all Americans, but have never met one I didn’t like.”
More Gordon Allport Quotes
-
-
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.
GORDON ALLPORT -
Love-incomparably the greatest psychotherapeutic agent-is something that professional psychiatry cannot of itself create, focus, nor release.
GORDON ALLPORT -
The mature religious sentiment is ordinarily fashioned in the workshop of doubt.
GORDON ALLPORT -
Each person is an idiom unto himself, an apparent violation of the syntax of the species.
GORDON ALLPORT -
Personality is and does something…It is what lies behind specific acts and within the individual
GORDON ALLPORT -
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.
GORDON ALLPORT -
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.
GORDON ALLPORT -
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.
GORDON ALLPORT -
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.
GORDON ALLPORT -
The specific goals we set for ourselves are almost always subsidiary to our long range intentions.
GORDON ALLPORT -
Open-mindedness is considered to be a virtue. But, strictly speaking, it cannot occur.
GORDON ALLPORT -
Prejudgments become prejudices only if they are not reversible when exposed to new knowledge.
GORDON ALLPORT -
Prejudgments become prejudices only if they are reversible when exposed to new knowledge.
GORDON ALLPORT -
People who are aware of, and ashamed of, their prejudices are well on the road to eliminating them.
GORDON ALLPORT -
If a person is capable of rectifying his erroneous judgments in the light of new evidence he is not prejudiced.
GORDON ALLPORT -
It takes a major unhappiness, a prolonged and bitter experience, to drive us away from loyalties once formed.
GORDON ALLPORT -
And sometimes no amount of punishment can make us repudiate our loyalty.
GORDON ALLPORT -
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?
GORDON ALLPORT -
[As] Santayana wrote, ‘Nothing requires a rarer intellectual heroism than willingness to see one’s equation written out.’
GORDON ALLPORT -
Each 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 ALLPORT -
But there are innumerable instances in human life where a single association, never reinforced, results in the establishment of a life-long dynamic system.
GORDON ALLPORT -
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.
GORDON ALLPORT -
Thwarted lives have the most character-conditioned hate
GORDON ALLPORT -
Life is too short so we must generalize.
GORDON ALLPORT -
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.
GORDON ALLPORT -
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.
GORDON ALLPORT