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 ALLPORTIndeed the measure of our intellectual maturity, one philosopher suggests, is our capacity to feel less and less satisfied with our answers to better problems.
More Gordon Allport Quotes
-
-
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 -
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 -
There is a story of an Oxford student who once remarked, “I despise all Americans, but have never met one I didn’t like.”
GORDON ALLPORT -
And sometimes no amount of punishment can make us repudiate our loyalty.
GORDON ALLPORT -
Love-incomparably the greatest psychotherapeutic agent-is something that professional psychiatry cannot of itself create, focus, nor release.
GORDON ALLPORT -
We cannot know the young child’s personality by studying his systems of interest, for his attention is as yet too labile, his reactions impulsive, and interests unformed.
GORDON ALLPORT -
People who are aware of, and ashamed of, their prejudices are well on the road to eliminating them.
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 -
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 -
Many studies have discovered a close link between prejudice and “patriotism” . . .
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 -
It takes a major unhappiness, a prolonged and bitter experience, to drive us away from loyalties once formed.
GORDON ALLPORT -
The specific goals we set for ourselves are almost always subsidiary to our long range intentions.
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