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 ALLPORTFrom adolescence onward, however, the surest clue to personality is the hierarchy of interests, including the loves and loyalties of adult life.
More Gordon Allport Quotes
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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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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)
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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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People who are aware of, and ashamed of, their prejudices are well on the road to eliminating them.
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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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Prejudgments become prejudices only if they are not reversible when exposed to new knowledge.
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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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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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Love received and love given comprise the best form of therapy.
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The specific goals we set for ourselves are almost always subsidiary to our long range intentions.
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Open-mindedness is considered to be a virtue. But, strictly speaking, it cannot occur.
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Many studies have discovered a close link between prejudice and “patriotism” . . .
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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.
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Thwarted lives have the most character-conditioned hate
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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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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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Extreme bigots are almost always super-patriots.
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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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As partisans of our own way of life, we cannot help thinking in a partisan manner.
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Given a thimbleful of [dramatic] facts we rush to make generalizations as large as a tub.
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Prejudgments become prejudices only if they are reversible when exposed to new knowledge.
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If a person is capable of rectifying his erroneous judgments in the light of new evidence he is not prejudiced.
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Personality is and does something…It is what lies behind specific acts and within the individual
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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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[As] Santayana wrote, ‘Nothing requires a rarer intellectual heroism than willingness to see one’s equation written out.’
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Love-incomparably the greatest psychotherapeutic agent-is something that professional psychiatry cannot of itself create, focus, nor release.
GORDON ALLPORT