American Psychologist Quotes

John Dewey

William James

B. F. Skinner

Abraham Maslow

Steven Pinker

John B. Watson

Carl Rogers

Right action tends to be defined in terms of general individual rights and standards that have been critically examined and agreed upon by the whole society.

Lawrence Kohlberg

Millions of people have wrecked their lives in angry turmoil, because they refused to accept the worst; refused to try to improve upon it; refused to salvage what they could from the wreck. Instead of trying to reconstruct their fortunes, they engaged in a bitter and "violent contest with experience"- and ended up victims of that brooding fixation known as melancholia.

The American mind in particular has been trained to equate success with victory, to equate doing well with beating someone.

If we want to raise young adults who know how to solve problems, we must let them have problems to solve while they are still adolescents.

If people have multiple identities and deal with multiple realities, why should we expect them to be ontological purists?

I was born from nothing and to nothing I will return. And yet, when i say the word nothing, when i admit, at last, 'I am nothing,' i feel mysteriously like something again, ground zero, genesis, the pull of possibilities.

An affective response more appropriate to another's situation than one's own.

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

Social power [is the] potential influence, the ability of a person or group to induce or prevent change in another. Social control [is] the process by which members of a social entity are influenced to adhere to values and principles of proper behavior deemed appropriate for that social entity.

We should be on our guard against the temptation to argue directly from skill to capacity, and to assume when a man displays skill in some feat, his capacity is therefore considerable.

Tom Hatherley Pear

The power of imagination is incredible. Often we see athletes achieving unbelievable results and wonder how they did it. One of the tools they use is visualization or mental imagery… they made the choice to create their destinies and visualized their achievements before they ultimately succeeded.

George Kohlrieser

The male has paid a heavy price for his masculine 'privilege' and power. He is out of touch with his emotions and his body. He is playing by the rules of the male game plan and with lemming-like purpose he is destroying himself-emotionally, psychologically and physically.

Honest, open communication is the only street that leads us into the real world... We then begin to grow as never before. And once we are on this road, happiness cannot be far away.

John Powell (Jesuit)

In the years ahead of me, I learned that the world is actually filled with people ready to tell you how likely something is, and what it means to be realistic. But what I have also learned is that no one, no one truly knows what is possible until they go and do it.

We will use the actions of others to decide on proper behavior for ourselves, especially when we view those others as similar to ourselves

Robert Cialdini

A MAN WITH A CONVICTION is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point.

The marriage relationship is one of God's creations for building up people. It gives husbands and wives the chance to minister to an immortal human being in a uniquely intimate fashion. To enjoy the meaningfulness of marriage, then, requires a once-made but ongoing commitment of mutual ministry to our mates and the more we seize them, the more meaning our marriage will have.

The problem of individual differences and group differences would not be made to disappear by abolishing tests. One cannot treat a fever by throwing away the thermometer.

In real life, as well as in experiments, people can come to believe things that never really happened.

Elizabeth Loftus

The advantages of having decisions made by groups are often lost because of powerful psychological pressures that arise when the members work closely together, share the same set of values and, above all, face a crisis situation that puts everyone under intense stress

If we went into stores only when we needed to buy something, and if once there we bought only what we needed, the economy would collapse, boom.

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.

The causes of violence lie in our basic values and the way in which we bring up our children and youth.

James W. Prescott

Two kinds of reading can be distinguished. I call them reading like a reader and reading like a writer... when you read like a reader, you identify with the characters in the story. The story is what you learn about. When you read like a writer, you identify with the author and learn about writing.

Frank Smith (psycholinguist)

During the past three decades numerous empirical studies of economic behavior have been carried out and their theoretical foundation has been clarified. There was a rapid development and articulation of data, theory, and methodology. A new discipline of behavioral economics was emerging [which] consists of the empirical investigations of the behavior of businessmen and consumers in one country in one time. Generalizations about economic behavior emerge gradually by comparing behavior observed under different circumstances.