Psychologist Quotes

The names that do the serious damage are the ones we call ourselves. The stereotypes we give ourselves are the ones that matter in the long run, not the ones imposed on us by other people.

Judith Rich Harris

One of the surprising privileges of intellectuals is that they are free to be scandalously asinine without harming their reputations.

Geniuses are commonly believed to excel other men in their power of sustained attention... But it is their genius making them attentive, not their attention making geniuses of them.

Abstract words are ancient coins whose concrete images in the give and take of talk have worn away with use.

Reducing complexity by order formation is the number one skill needed by all leaders in the twenty-first century

Followers do not like themselves, of course; that's why they crawl. And masters have nothing but contempt for their subservants, which is why they impose such colorful embarrassments upon them.

Social psychology is the scientific study of the obvious, which invariably leads to conflicting results.

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

Elizabeth Loftus

We are dealing with a fundamental characteristic, inherent in human nature, a potentiality given to all or most human beings at birth, which most often is lost or buried or inhibited as the person gets enculturated.

Among all the disputes and uncertainties of the ethnographers about the races of Europe, one fact stands out clearly – namely, that we can distinguish a race of northerly distribution and origin, characterized physically by fair color of hair and skin and eyes, by tall stature and dolichocephaly (i. e. long shape of head), and mentally by great independence of character, individual initiative, and tenacity of will. Many names have been used to denote this type,.... It is also called the Nordic type.

William McDougall

Perhaps the challenge is to invent the political structure that will give conscience a better chance against authority.

Stanley Milgram

For some years now, there has been proof that the devastating effects of the traumatization of children take their inevitable tollon society--a fact that we are still forbidden to recognize. This knowledge concerns every single one of us, and--if disseminated widely enough--should lead to fundamental changes in society; above all, to a halt in the blind escalation of violence.

Leadership is a group project, and all of us are necessary to fill it. Wise leaders will realize this and encourage their groups to develop their own evolving leadership potential.

I suggest the importance of developing common identity in overcoming the negative consequences of polarization.

In the integrated relational model presented here, sexuality and relational issues are not seen as alternative foci. Rather, sexuality is regarded as a central realm in which relational conflicts are shaped and played out.

Stephen A. Mitchell

... neither tolerance nor intolerance is grounded in science and reason, but they are themselves acts of faith grounded in social custom and the politics of expediency and power.

Atheism may be, in some cases, just verbal behavior masking personal feelings that may be very different, perhaps even deeply religious.

If I were to let my life be taken over by what is urgent, I might very well never get around to what is essential.

Bittersweet creatures : So what is art, that it can enhance social abilities and transform the self? First of all, art is something that lasts and can spread to others. So although one can imagine a lover whispering an improvised poem into her lover's ear, for the most part a poem will travel in time and space, and last beyond the moment of its conception.

If cognitive processes can be realized in a general machine then it is possible to execute mental operations in artifacts that are not necessarily subject to the embarrassing spatio-temporal limitations and structural frailties of a biological processor.

Almighty God freely bestows the good things in this world in proportion to a person's mental readiness to receive.

Norman Vincent Peale

.. if you can tell the difference between good advice and bad advice, you don't need advice.

Laurence J. Peter

In other words, knowledge of the external world begins with an immediate utilisation of things, whereas knowledge of self is stopped by this purely practical and utilitarian contact.

If we designate as intelligence, quantitatively, the total of mental functioning, it is evident that the suppression of verbal thought involves a defect, relatively very important among cultivated individuals leading a complex social life: the uneducated person from this point of view is a defective.

Something about the topic of consciousness makes people, like the White Queen in Through The Looking Glass, believe six impossible things before breakfast.