“When we depress, we believe we are the victims of a feeling over which we have no control.”

“When we are victimized, we feel the urge to victimize those who have hurt us in return. This is natural. It is a compulsion to force them to connect with us through empathy.”

“We can reproach ourselves for some action, for a remark, but not for a feeling, quite simply because we have no control at all over it.”

“To be depressed or neurotic is passive. It happened to us; we are its victim, and we have no control over it. This use of nouns and adjectives makes it logical for us to believe that we can do nothing for ourselves…but you are capable of choosing something better. If it is a choice, it follows that you are responsible for making it. With verbs, you are not a victim of mental illness; you are either the beneficiary of your own good choices or the victim of your own bad choices. You are not ill in the usual sense of having the flu or food poisoning. A choice theory world is a tough responsible world; you cannot use grammar to escape responsibility for what you are doing.”

“We have no sympathy with those who are controlled by ideas and passions which we neither understand nor feel. Thus they who live to satisfy the appetites do not believe it possible to live in and for the soul.”

“We don't have a great war in our generation, or a great depression, but we do, we have a great war of the spirit. We have a great revolution against the culture. The great depression is our lives. We have a spiritual depression.”

“When we speak of power, we mean man's control over the minds and actions of other men.”

“We are the result of processes much more complicated than the small aspects of our lives and societies over which we have some control.”

“… no one can do a thing about feelings, they exist and there's no way to censor them. We can reproach ourselves for some action, for a remark, but not for a feeling, quite simply because we have no control at all over it.”

“When we hear men are the greater victims of crime, we tend to say, ‘Well, it’s men hurting other men.’ When we hear that blacks are the greater victims, we consider it racist to say, ‘Well, it’s blacks hurting blacks.’ The victim is a victim no matter who the perpetrator was.”