Psychiatrist Quotes

No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him.

In the colonies the economic infrastructure is also a superstructure. The cause is effect: You are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich.

To have arrived at the truth means that one no longer fears death. For death and truth are similar in that they both require a great courage if one wishes to face them.

Nawal El Saadawi

Man reacts upon and toward the external universe in three ways, namely, by his active nature ; by his intellectual nature ; by his moral nature — that is, he acts upon it, thinks about it, and feels toward it.

Richard Maurice Bucke

In all cultures, the family imprints its members with selfhood. Human experience of identity has two elements; a sense of belonging and a sense of being separate. The laboratory in which these ingredients are mixed and dispensed is the family, the matrix of identity.

Salvador Minuchin

If you want fame and fortune, invent a pill.

James Crichton-Browne

Some authors have conceptualized depression as a "depletion syndrome" because of the prominence of fatigability; they postulate that the patient exhausts his available energy during the period prior to the onset of the depression and that the depressed state represents a kind of hibernation, during which the patient gradually builds up a new story of energy.

Asylums are nothing more than gardens of human cabbages, of miserable, grotesque, repugnant human beings watered with the fertilizer of injections.

António Lobo Antunes

He screamed out, 'Take the soup away!
O take the nasty soup away!
I won't have any soup today.'

Heinrich Hoffmann

Alcohol is a pervasive fact of life, but an extraordinary fact—pleasurable and destructive, anathematized and adulated, and deeply ambiguous…the genie in the bottle.

Griffith Edwards

The one-sided exploitation of existential guilt is thought reform's trump card, and perhaps its most important source of emotional influence over its participants. Revolving around it are issues most decisive to thought reform's outcome.

Robert Jay Lifton

Imagination coupled with skepticism and an ability to wonder — if you possess these, bountiful nature will hand you some of the secrets out of her inexhaustible store. The pleasure you will experience in discovering truth will repay you for your work; don't expect other compensation, because it may not come.

Immanuel Velikovsky

The psychopaths are always around. In calm times we study them, but in times of upheaval, they rule over us.

Ernst Kretschmer

The hospital that feeds you refined sugar, white bread, canned soup, bouillon cubes, and frozen vegetables should be closed by the health department as a menace to the public health.

Sleep is an essential part of life-but more important, sleep is a gift.

Our civilization represses not only "the instincts", not only sexuality, but any form of transcendence. Among one-dimensional men, it is not surprising that someone with an insistent experience of other dimensions, that he cannot entirely deny or forget, will run the risk either of being destroyed by the others, or of betraying what he knows.

People who have three daughters try once more
And then it's fifty-fifty they'll have four.
Those with a son or sons will let things be.
Hence all these surplus women. Q.E.D.

Justin Richardson

The mathematician learns early to accept no fact, to believe no statement, however apparently reasonable or obvious or trivial, until it has been proved, rigorously and totally by a series of steps proceeding from universally accepted first principles.

Natural selection involves no plan, no goal, and no direction — just genes increasing and decreasing in frequency depending on whether individuals with those genes have, relative to other individuals, greater or lesser reproductive success.

Randolph M. Nesse

On earth there are assuredly other things great besides man, though none greater; and in man there are other things great besides mind, though none greater.

His comment about a book whose author claimed was channeled from the spirit of William James, the great American psychologist and philosopher: "If the vapid writings... did indeed emanate from him, I can only say that this implies a terrible post-mortem reduction of personal capacities. (Survival of death with such an appalling decay of personality makes it, at least to me, a rather unattractive prospect.)"

In art, as in science, reductionism does not trivialize our perception - of color, light, and perspective - but allows us to see each of these components in a new way.

From this patient, and from others like her, I have learnt that seemingly epileptic reactions in adolescents can indicate the latter's capacity to step out of time. In such cases the apparent epileptic tendency disappears as the patient matures.

Arthur Guirdham

Combat leaves a lasting impression on men's minds, changing them as radically as any crucial experience through which they live.

Roy R. Grinker, Sr.

Competence in heterosexuality, or at least the appearance or pretense of such competence, is as much a public affair as a privateone. Thus, going steady is a high school diploma in heterosexuality; engagement a BA; marriage an MA; and children a Ph.D.