20th-century Psychologist Quotes

To establish that a rule is likely to be true, one must try to prove it false.

Stuart Sutherland

Our time in this life is limited. And how we respect that time will create a greater possibility for fulfillment.

Of all our basic virtues, courage is the one that helps us to live exactly the way we want and provides the psychological fuel we need to create, take risks, help others, and face hard times... Courageous action is humanity at its finest.

Robert Biswas-Diener

The criterion for what is good is based on whether it relieves someone, brings joy, or soothes a distress.

Men have been trained and conditioned by women, not unlike the way Pavlov conditioned his dogs, into becoming their slaves.

Memory's vices are also its virtues, elements of a bridge across time that allows us to link the mind with the world.

Daniel Schacter

We love dogs and eat cows not because dogs and cows are fundamentally different—cows, like dogs, have feelings, preferences, and consciousness—but because our perception of them is different.

Androgyny is not trying to manage the relationship between the opposites; it is simply flowing between them.

Some adolescents are troubled and some get into trouble. But the great majority (almost nine out of ten) do not.... The bottomline is that good kids don't suddenly go bad in adolescence.

Laurence Steinberg

The idea is that you could sacrifice something of value, and that would have transcendent utility. That is by no means an unsophisticated idea. In fact, it might be the greatest idea that human beings ever came up with.

Jordan Peterson

Our attempts to reshape others may produce change, but the change is distortion rather than transformation.

Integrity is unity of the personality; it implies being brutally honest with ourselves about our intentionality. Since intentionality is inextricably bound up with the daimonic, this is never an easy, nor always pleasant pursuit. But being willing to admit our daimonic tendencies - to know them consciously and to wisely oversee them - brings with it the invaluable blessing of freedom, vigor, inner strength, and self-acceptance.

Stephen A. Diamond

There is not one text reference to characteristic Protestant religious life in these books... The dominant theme is the denial of religion as an actual part of American life.

Wonderful ideas cannot spring out of nothing. They build on a foundation of other ideas.

Eleanor Duckworth

The way you look at the world determines how creative you can be.

When evaluating the reliability and generality of data, it is often important to know the aims of the experimenter. When evaluating the importance of experimental results, however, science has a trick of disregarding the experimenter's rationale and finding a more appropriate context for the data than the one he proposed.

The real relatedness between two people is experienced in the small tasks they do together: the quiet conversation when the day's upheavels are at rest, the soft word of understanding, the daily companionship, the encouragement offered in a difficult moment, the small gift when least expected, the spontaneous gesture of love.

Robert A. Johnson (psychotherapist)

Change does not fail to occur because of insincerity. The heart patient is not insincere about his wish to keep living, even as he reaches for another cigarette. Change fails to occur because we mean both things. It fails to occur because we are a living contradiction.

Although the idea that we have no bananas is unlikely to be a new one, or one that is hard to grasp, the idea that no bananas, no sheep, no children, no prospects are really all the same, in that they have the same numerosity, is a very abstract one.

Brian Butterworth

If the facts do not conform to the theory, they must be disposed of.

In spite of some unresolved issues, the close match we have found between mental rotation and their counterparts in the physical world leads inevitably to speculations about the functions and origin of human spatial imagination. It may not be premature to propose that spatial imagination has evolved as a reflection of the physics and geometry of the external world. The rules that govern structures and motions in the physical world may, over evolutionary history, have been incorporated into human perceptual machinery, giving rise to demonstrable correspondences between mental imagery and its physical analogues.

Our disregard of civic and moral virtue as an educational priority is having a tangible effect on the attitudes, understanding and behavior of large portions of the youth population in the United States today.

Personalities are like impressionistic paintings. At a distance, each person is 'all of a piece'; up close, each is a bewildering complexity of moods, cognitions, and motives.

Theodore Millon

If the null hypothesis is not rejected, [Sir Ronald] Fisher's position was that nothing could be concluded. But researchers find it hard to go to all the trouble of conducting a study only to conclude that nothing can be concluded.

Frank L. Schmidt

Learning is most often considered. a process of getting rather than giving. This is most evident in conceptions of student/teacher roles: Teachers give and students get. Yet, in adult learning both giving and getting are critical.