“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.”

From adolescence onward, however, the surest clue to personality is the hierarchy of interests, including the loves and loyalties of adult life.

There is a story of an Oxford student who once remarked, “I despise all Americans, but have never met one I didn’t like.”

The mature religious sentiment is ordinarily fashioned in the workshop of doubt.

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.

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)

As partisans of our own way of life, we cannot help thinking in a partisan manner.

And sometimes no amount of punishment can make us repudiate our loyalty.

But there are innumerable instances in human life where a single association, never reinforced, results in the establishment of a life-long dynamic system.

If a person is capable of rectifying his erroneous judgments in the light of new evidence he is not prejudiced.

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.

Given a thimbleful of [dramatic] facts we rush to make generalizations as large as a tub.

Thwarted lives have the most character-conditioned hate

Prejudgments become prejudices only if they are reversible when exposed to new knowledge.

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.

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?

Many studies have discovered a close link between prejudice and “patriotism” . . .

I don’t wear my political feelings on my sleeve. However, if I’m asked, I will answer honestly.

Ask yourself the secret of your success. Listen to your answer, and practice it.

I do know this: God does answer your prayers, but it’s not always in the way you expect.

God answers prayers, but he doesn’t always answer it your way.

You don’t want a million answers as much as you want a few forever questions.

Where were you born? Where is your home? Where are you going? What are you doing? Think about these once in a while and watch your answers change.

I answer only to God.

If a man urge me to tell wherefore I loved him, I feel it cannot be expressed but by answering: Because it was he, because it was myself.