Who's Who in Psychology
Psychology as the behaviorist views it is a purely
objective experimental branch of natural science.
Its theoretical goal is the prediction and control
of behavior. Introspection forms no essential part
of its methods, nor is the scientific value of its
data dependent upon the readiness with which
they lend themselves to interpretation in terms of
consciousness. The behaviorist, in his efforts to
get a unitary scheme of animal response,
recognizes no dividing line between man and
brute. The behavior of man, with all of its
refinement and complexity, forms only a part of
the behaviorist's total scheme of investigation
Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-
formed, and my own specified world to
bring them up in and I'll guarantee to
take any one at random and train him to
become any type of specialist I might
select – doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-
chief and, yes, even beggar-man and
thief, regardless of his talents,
penchants, tendencies, abilities,
vocations, and race of his ancestors. I
am going beyond my facts and I admit
it, but so have the advocates of the
contrary and they have been doing it for
many thousands of years.
Most people do not really want
freedom, because freedom
involves responsibility, and most
people are frightened of
responsibility.

Time spent with cats is never
wasted.

We are never so defensless against
suffering as when we love.
Dreams are often most
profound when they seem the
most crazy.

The ego is not master in its
own house

The mind is like an iceberg, it
floats with one-seventh of its
bulk above water.
The curious paradox is that when I accept
myself just as I am, then I can change.

When I look at the world I'm pessimistic,
but when I look at people I am optimistic.
I believe that the testing of the student's
achievements in order to see if he meets
some criterion held by the teacher, is
directly contrary to the implications of
therapy for significant learning.
What I am is good enough if I would
only be it openly
“If we value independence, if we are
disturbed by the growing conformity of
knowledge, of values, of attitudes, which
our present system induces, then we may
wish to set up conditions of learning which
make for uniqueness, for self-direction,
and for self-initiated learning.”
Children love and want to be loved and they very much prefer the joy of
accomplishment to the triumph of hateful failure. Do not mistake a child for his
symptom.
Doubt is the brother of shame.

Someday, maybe, there will exist a well-informed, well considered and yet
fervent public conviction that the most deadly of all possible sins is the mutilation
of a child’s spirit.

For when established identities become outworn or unfinished ones threaten to
remain incomplete, special crises compel men to wage holy wars, by the cruelest
means, against those who seem to question or threaten their unsafe ideological
bases
“It may be that we are puppets-puppets
controlled by the strings of society. But at least we
are puppets with perception, with awareness. And
perhaps our awareness is the first step to our
liberation.

The soldier does not wish to appear a coward,
disloyal, or un-American. The situation has been so
defined that he can see himself as patriotic,
courageous, and manly only through compliance

The key to the behavior of subjects lies not in pent-
up anger or aggression, but in the nature of their
relationship to authority. They have given
themselves to the authority; they see themselves as
instruments for the execution of his wishes; once
so defined, they are unable to break free.
The disappearance of a sense of
responsibility is the most far-reaching
consequence of submission to authority.

It is easy to ignore responsibility when one is
only an intermediate link in a chain of action

With numbing regularity, good people were
seen to knuckle under the demands of
authority and perform actions that were
callous and severe,
The principle goal of education is to
create men who are capable of doing
new things, not simply of repeating what
other generations have done - men who
are creative, inventive and discoverers
The current state of knowledge is a
moment in history, changing just as
rapidly as the state of knowledge in the
past has ever changed and, in many
instances, more rapidly.
“Logical positivists have never taken
psychology into account in their
epistemology, but they affirm that
logical beings and mathematical beings
are nothing but linguistic structures.
This means that no single logic is
strong enough to support the total
construction of human knowledge
The question of the meaning of life is, as
the Buddha taught, not edifying. One
must immerse oneself in the river of life
and let the question drift away.

The creative members of an orthodoxy,
any orthodoxy, ultimately outgrow their
disciplines.

Only the wounded healer can truly heal

If one is to love oneself, one must
behave in ways that one can admire.
What? 'Borderline patients play
games'? That what you said? Ernest,
you'll never be a real therapist if you
think like that. That's exactly what I
meant earlier when I talked about
the dangers of diagnosis. There are
borderlines and there are
borderlines. Labels do violence to
people. You can't treat the label;
you have to treat the person behind
the label.
One of the things that we know about
memory for very upsetting experiences,
traumatic experiences, is that the memory
does not work like a videotape recorder.
You don't just record the event and play
it back later the way a videotape player
would work. The process is much more
complicated, and actually what's
happening is you're storing bits and
pieces of the experience. Later, when you
try to tell somebody what happened, you
are in some sense reconstructing that
experience, you're piecing it together and
essentially telling a story about your
experience.
Elizabeth Loftus
Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission
in life; everyone must carry out a concrete
assignment that demands fulfillment. Therein he
cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated,
thus, everyone's task is unique as his specific
opportunity to implement it.

Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning
of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is
he who is asked.

Meaning must be found and cannot be given.
Meaning is like laughter, he says:  You cannot force
someone to laugh, you must tell him a joke!  The
same applies to faith, hope, and love -- they cannot
be be brought forth by an act of will, our own or
someone else's.
Between stimulus and response there is a
space. In that space is our power to choose
our response. In our response lies our growth
and our freedom.

Each man is questioned by life; and he can
only answer to life by answering for his own
life; to life he can only respond by being
responsible.

What is to give light must endure burning.

When we are no longer able to change a
situation - we are challenged to change
ourselves.
B.F. Skinner
1904 - 1990
I did not direct my life. I didn't design it.
I never made decisions. Things always
came up and made them for me. That's
what life is.

Give me a child and I'll shape him into
anything.

If you're old, don't try to change
yourself, change your environment.
Since there will be no one left to talk peace after
the next war, it makes good sense to break with
tradition and hold the peace conference first.

We may be up against a stone wall, but we don’t
have to bloody our heads against it unless we
choose to.

What happened in the past that was painful has a
great deal to do with what we are today, but
revisiting this painful past can contribute little or
nothing to what we need to do now . . .
If everyone could learn that what is right for me
does not make it right for anyone else, the world
would be a much happier place.

It is almost impossible for anyone, even the most
ineffective among us, to continue to choose misery
after becoming aware that it is a choice.
Alfred Binet
I wish that one would be persuaded that psychological
experiments, especially those on the complex functions, are
not improved [by large studies]; the statistical method gives
only mediocre results; some recent examples demonstrate that.
The American authors, who love to do things big, often
publish experiments that have been conducted on hundreds
and thousands of people; they instinctively obey the prejudice
that the persuasiveness of a work is proportional to the
number of observations. This is only an illusion.

Mere numbers cannot bring out ... the intimate essence of the
experiment. This conviction comes naturally when one
watches a subject at work. ... What things can happen! What
reflections, what remarks, what feelings, or, on the other hand,
what blind automatism, what absence of ideas! … The
experimenter judges what may be going on in [the subject's]
mind, and certainly feels difficulty in expressing all the
oscillations of a thought in a simple, brutal number, which can
have only a deceptive precision. How, in fact, could it sum up
what would need several pages of description!
I was awfully curious to find out why I didn't go insane.

If I were dropped out of a plane into the ocean and told
the nearest land was a thousand miles away, I'd still
swim. And I'd despise the one who gave up.

If you deliberately plan on being less than you are
capable of being, then I warn you that you'll be unhappy
for the rest of your life.


The ability to be in the present moment is a major
component of mental wellness.

We fear to know the fearsome and unsavory aspects of
ourselves, but we fear even more to know the godlike in
ourselves.

What is necessary to change a person is to change his
awareness of himself.
One cannot be deeply responsive to the world
without being saddened very often.

The psychic task which a person can and must set
for himself is not to feel secure, but to be able to
tolerate insecurity.

There is only one meaning of life: the act of living
itself.

There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains
so much destructive feeling as moral indignation,
which permits envy or to be acted out under the
guise of virtue.

To die is poignantly bitter, but the idea of having
to die without having lived is unbearable.

There can be no real freedom without the freedom
to fail.
A child becomes an adult when he realizes that he has
a right not only to be right but also to be wrong.

A teacher should have maximal authority, and minimal
power.

Clear thinking requires courage rather than intelligence.

There is no psychology; there is only biography and
autobiography.  
Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's
self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own
self-importance, learn so easily.

It is easier to do one's duty to others than to one's self. If you do your duty to others,
you are considered reliable. If you do your duty to yourself, you are considered selfish.

People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not
something one finds, it is something one creates.
Thomas Szasz