Quotes about psychology
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“Having analyzed these traits, we can now advance a definition of propaganda — not an exhaustive definition, unique and exclusive of all others, but at least a partial one: Propaganda is a set of methods employed by an organized group that wants to bring about the active or passive participation in its actions of a mass of individuals, psychologically unified through psychological manipulations and incorporated in an organization.”

Jacques Ellul book Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes

Vintage, p. 61
Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes (1962)

“First of all, modern propaganda is based on scientific analyses of psychology and sociology. Step by step, the propagandist builds his techniques on the basis of his knowledge of man, his tendencies, his desires, his needs, his psychic mechanisms, his conditioning — and as much on social psychology as on depth psychology. He shapes his procedures on the basis of our knowledge of groups and their laws of formation and dissolution, of mass influences, and of environmental limitations. Without the scientific research of modern psychology and sociology there would be no propaganda, or rather we still would be in the primitive stages of propaganda that existed in the time of Pericles or Augustus.”

Jacques Ellul book Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes

Vintage, p. 4
Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes (1962)

Knowledge, Time, Law

“Facts don’t matter to people as much as people think they do. People don’t believe because of facts and evidence—they believe things because it’s a part of a story that they tell themselves. And so, I guess part of what I’m doing is understanding those stories, and understanding psychologically why are these stories being told.”

Natalie Wynn ContraPoints

ContraPoints, Miscellaneous, Contrapoints Is De-Radicalizing Young, Right-Wing Men https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Nrz4-FZx6k (Vice News, 2019)

Thinking, Understanding, People, Parting

“Nagel once claimed that it is psychologically impossible to believe the Reductionist View. Buddha claimed that, though it is very hard, it is possible. I find Buddha’s claim to be true. After reviewing my arguments, I find that, at the reflective or intellectual level, though it is very hard to believe the Reductionist View, this is possible. My remaining doubts or fears seem to me irrational. Since I can believe this view, I assume that others can do so too. We can believe the truth about ourselves.”

Derek Parfit book Reasons and Persons

Source: Reasons and Persons (1984), p. 280

Truth, Fear

“Certain actual sleeping pills cause retrograde amnesia. It can be true that, if I take such a pill, I shall remain awake for an hour, but after my night’s sleep I shall have no memories of the second half of this hour. I have in fact taken such pills, and found out what the results are like. Suppose that I took such a pill nearly an hour ago. The person who wakes up in my bed tomorrow will not be psychologically continuous with me as I was half an hour ago. I am now on psychological branch-line, which will end soon when I fall asleep. During this half-hour, I am psychologically continuous with myself in the past. But I am not now psychologically continuous with myself in the future. I shall never later remember what I do or think or feel during this half-hour. This means that, in some respects, my relation to myself tomorrow is like a relation to another person. Suppose, for instance, that I have been worrying about some practical question. I now see the solution. Since it is clear what I should do, I form a firm intention. In the rest of my life, it would be enough to form this intention. But, when I am no this psychological branch-line, this is not enough. I shall not later remember what I have now decided, and I shall not wake up with the intention that I have now formed. I must therefore communicate with myself tomorrow as if I was communicating with someone else. I must write myself a letter, describing my decision, and my new intention. I must then place this letter where I am bound to notice it tomorrow. I do not in fact have any memories of making such a decision, and writing such a letter. But I did once find such a letter underneath my razor.”

Derek Parfit book Reasons and Persons

Source: Reasons and Persons (1984), pp. 287-288

Sleep, Night, Question, Past

“Few people realize the enormous but always invisible and quiet psychological leverage that new ideas have upon human consciousness; and this is especially so with teachings of a spiritual or intellectual type. All these teachings are replete with the divine conceptions of the gods who first gave Truth to men; and this is the secret of the immense sway that Religion per se (apart from mere degenerate religions) has upon human intellect.”

Gottfried de Purucker (1874–1942) Author, Theosophist

Source: The Esoteric Tradition (1935), Chapter 2

God, Religion, People, Truth

“These two teachings once held secret, or openly promulgated in a more or less imperfect form, are examples of the manner in which from age to age when the need arises for so doing, esoteric teachings are openly developed by the Brotherhood of sages and seers. Such teachings profoundly modify civilization because they profoundly change human psychology and the spiritual and intellectual vision of mankind.”

Gottfried de Purucker (1874–1942) Author, Theosophist

Source: The Esoteric Tradition (1935), Chapter 2

Secret, Age, Change

“Physical science comes nearest to that complete system of exact knowledge which all sciences have before them as an ideal. Some fall far short of it. The physicist who inveighs against the lack of coherence and the indefiniteness of theological theories, will probably speak not much less harshly of the theories of biology and psychology. They also fail to come up to his standard of methodology. On the other side of him stands an even superior being — the pure mathematician — who has no high opinion of the methods of deduction used in physics, and does not hide his disapproval of the laxity of what is accepted as proof in physical science. And yet somehow knowledge grows in all these branches. Wherever a way opens we are impelled to seek by the only methods that can be devised for that particular opening, not over-rating the security of our finding, but conscious that in this activity of mind we are obeying the light that is in our nature.”

Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882–1944) British astrophysicist

Science and the Unseen World (1929)

Light, Nature, Knowledge, Way

“Meditation practice ... has nothing to do with achieving perfection, achieving some absolute state or other. It is purely getting into what we are, really examining our actual psychological process without being ashamed of it.”

Chögyam Trungpa (1939–1987) Tibetan Buddhist lama and writer

Source: Glimpses of Abhidharma, p. 65

Perfection

“Modern philosophy, an element due to which the surrounding reality and even the psychology of people are changing. The first ray of light in the kingdom of darkness was the Internet, after a smartphone was proved that a small device the size of a palm can completely replace the TV and computer. All people in the older generation remained alive in television manipulations, not wanting to join in the innovations. 50 years ago, smartphones and the Internet were just sketches of dreamers, as 200 years ago dreamers dreamed of flying ships, which we now call planes, but dreams became reality and now a new dreamer with a Japanese name plans to destroy the main pillar of the monopoly of world-owned corporations by creating an alternative currency .”

Maxim Mernes (1996) Russian businessman, investor, blogger

About the state and technology Source: Экономика Цифровой Эры, LiveLib, ru, 2019-11-21 https://www.livelib.ru/author/1229982-maksim-mernes,

Light, Dreams, People, Reality

“The December success of Bitcoin was primarily a psychological success, people as if they were not poisoned by the lies of the lack of alternatives to the dollar, the euro, they still understand at heart that any currency is paper. The success of Bitcoin was in this regard the first international rally against the global banking system. But, this could not last long for obvious reasons ... But, there are pluses, now every second Internet user knows about bitcoin, during the next cryptocurrency boom, these people join the movement.”

Maxim Mernes (1996) Russian businessman, investor, blogger

About libertarianism and blockchain Source: Максим Мернес: "Нужно покупать ликвидную криптовалюту", Maxim Mernes, 2019T08:56, @Максим Мернес, ru, 2019-11-21 https://argumenti.ru/society/2018/12/595045,

Understanding, People, Heart, Success

“The trend of employment is towards a high level, and a recurrence of chronic mass unemployment is most unlikely. The Keynesian techniques are now well understood, and there is no reason to fear a repetition of the New Deal experience of a government with the will to spend its way out of a recession, but frustrated in doing so by faulty knowledge. The political pressure for full employment is stronger than ever before; the experience of the inter-war years bit so deeply into the political psychology of the nation that full employment, if threatened, would always constitute the dominant issue at any election, and no right-wing party could now survive a year in office if it permitted the figures of unemployment which were previously quite normal.”

Anthony Crosland (1918–1977) British politician

'The Transition from Capitalism' in Richard Crossman (ed.), New Fabian Essays (Turnstile Press, 1952), pp. 39–40

Way, War, Fear, Knowledge

“I still feel that style is important for reading pleasure, and sex is important for pleasure in life. Each appeases a different type of desire. And while I find nothing shameful in taking direct erotic pleasure from reading or writing, I don’t think they entail a necessary relation. The processes you have me describing are contingent psychological processes. Neither marks one end nor the other of any necessary or even philosophical relationship…”

Samuel R. Delany (1942) American author, professor and literary critic

On including sexual themes in his writings in “Samuel R. Delany, The Art of Fiction No. 210” https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6088/samuel-r-delany-the-art-of-fiction-no-210-samuel-r-delany in The Paris Review (Summer 2011)

Reading, Pleasure, Sex, Thinking

“The Government of the proletarian dictatorship, together with the Communist Party and trade unions, is of course leaving no stone unturned in the effort to overcome the backward ideas of men and women, to destroy the old un-communist psychology. In law there is naturally complete equality of rights for men and women. And everywhere there is evidence of a sincere wish to put this equality into practice. We are bringing the women into the social economy, into legislation and government. All educational institutions are open to them, so that they can increase their professional and social capacities. We are establishing communal kitchens and public eating-houses, laundries and repairing shops, nurseries, kindergartens, children’s homes, educational institutes of all kinds. In short, we are seriously carrying out the demand in our programme for the transference of the economic and educational functions of the separate household to society. That will mean freedom for the woman from the old household drudgery and dependence on man. That enables her to exercise to the full her talents and her inclinations. The children are brought up under more favourable conditions than at home.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

As quoted by Clara Zetkin in "Lenin on the Women’s Question", My Memorandum Book https://www.marxists.org/archive/zetkin/1920/lenin/zetkin1.htm, 1920. Attributions

Home, Housing, Law, Freedom

“One step forward, two steps back. … It happens in the lives of individuals, and it happens in the history of nations and in the development of parties. It would be the most criminal cowardice to doubt even for a moment the inevitable and complete triumph of the principle of revolutionary Social-Democracy, of proletarian organization and Party discipline. We have already won a great deal, and we must go on fighting, undismayed by reverses, fighting steadfastly, scorning the philistine methods of circle wrangling, doing our very utmost to preserve the hard-won single Party tie linking all Russian Social-Democrats, and striving by dint of persistent and systematic work to give all Party members, and the workers in particular, a full and conscious understanding of the duties of Party members, of the struggle and Second Party Congress, of all the causes and all the stages of our divergence, and of the utter and disastrousness of opportunism., which, in the sphere of our programme and our tactics, helplessly surrenders to the bourgeois psychology, uncritically adopts the point of view of bourgeois democracy, and blunts the weapon of the class struggle of the proletariat.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Lenin Anthology, p. 119
1900s, One Step Forward, Two Steps Back (1904)

Democracy, Fight, Understanding, History

“Revision of character will be a much more tangible and scientific thing when the physiology of psychology becomes more than a controverted conjecture. There has been no attempt, no methodical attempt, to amend character thru physiological and neural violence; and about all we know about the possibilities of such a surgery consists of glimpses caught on occasions of casualty. We do know, however, that neural changes appear promptly and invariably in consciousness, and that there is every reason to suspect perfect parallelism between the neural and psychic processes. This unfailing attendance and dependence of mind on physical phenomena, and the superior tangibility of matter over consciousness, assure the prophet that an accomplished and sensitized attention is the all-essential to the achievement of psychical amendment by neural and physiological alteration. In the New Age which we prevision and approach, among the marvels to amaze our clumsy contemplations will be the miracles of cerebral surgery, the physics of the humors, the science of the physiology of consciousness.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), Individual Culture, pp. 274–275

Dependency, Perfection, Appearance, Age

“Every being is incomparably precious to himself. This is the most mournful feature in human psychology. We did not invent it. It was handed to us along with our fingers and our fondness fo eating. It is the psychic calamity of the animal kingdom.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

Source: "Human Nature is Defective", speech to the Young People's Socialist League, The Chicago Tribune, 20 Oct. 1910

Animals

“I am an unhappy man. I am haunted by my inability to express the inexpressible, to come to terms with the unknown. The pursuit of beauty is, of course, a major psychological drive. It its various guises—which is to say, the urge to perfection, the yearning to merge with the eternal, the explorer’s restlessness, the realization of an Absolute created by ourselves, yet larger than our totality—it is perhaps the most important human thrust.”

Jack Vance Demon Princes

Source: Demon Princes (1964-1981), The Palace of Love (1967), Chapter 6 (p. 346)

Perfection, Beauty

“The landing of the white man on Madagascar inflicted injury without measure. The consequences of that irruption of Europeans onto Madagascar were not psychological alone, since, as every authority has observed, there are inner relationships between consciousness and the social context.”

Frantz Fanon book Black Skin, White Masks

Source: Black Skin, White Masks (1952), p. 97

“Phenomena of the external sense are examined and set forth in physics; those of the internal sense in empirical psychology. Pure mathematics considers space in geometry and time in pure mechanics. To these is to be added a certain concept, intellectual to be sure in itself, but whose becoming actual in the concrete requires the auxiliary notions of time and space in the successive addition and simultaneous juxtaposition of separate units, which is the concept of number treated in arithmetic.”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

Kant's Inaugural Dissertation (1770), Section II On The Distinction Between The Sensible And The Intelligible Generally

Sense, Time, Mathematics, Success

“When I was a young student, I thought modern psychology could tell me the answers, but I soon found out that the best psychologists didn’t know a damn thing about the real core of the matter. Oh, I am not disparaging the work that has been done; it was badly needed and had been very useful in its way. None of ’em know what life is, what thought is, whether free will is a reality or an illusion, or whether that last question means anything. The best of ’em admit their ignorance; the worst of them make dogmatic assertions that are obvious absurdities.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Lost Legacy

Lost Legacy (p. 284)
Short fiction, Off the Main Sequence (2005)

Question, Reality, Way, Life

“All I knew about his life was that he had had the kind of childhood that turns people into psychological time bombs. How would I react when he started to go off? Did I have my own time bomb ticking away in me?”

Michael Nava (1954) American writer

Source: Henry Rios series of novels, Rag and Bone (2001), p.174

Childhood, Life, Time, People

“Broader than reform, deeper than revolution, this benign conspiracy for a new human agenda has triggered the most rapid cultural realignment in history. The great shuddering, irrevocable shift overtaking us is not a new political, religious, or philosophical system. It is a new mind — the ascendance of a startling worldview that gathers into its framework breakthrough science and insights from earliest recorded thought. The Aquarian Conspirators range across all levels of income and education, from the humblest to the highest. The Aquarian Conspirators range across all levels of income and education, from the humblest to the highest. There are schoolteachers and office workers, famous scientists, government officials and lawmakers, artists and millionaires, taxi drivers and celebrities, leaders in medicine, education, law, psychology. Some are open in their advocacy, and their names may be familiar. Others are quiet about their involvement, believing they can be more effective if they are not identified with ideas that have all too often been misunderstood.”

Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) American writer

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter One, The Conspiracy

Science, History, Law, Education

“The black masses of South Africa – and I know Bantu in all parts of South Africa – are orderly and peace-loving. They are loyal to the government and administration of the country … The groups of people seeking their own gain are small and they make use of mass psychology at mass gatherings, and by threats and other means are sometimes the cause of trouble … We do not intend to be perturbed by what is said and done in the outside world in all ignorance.”

Hendrik Verwoerd (1901–1966) Prime Minister of South Africa from 1958 until his assassination in 1966

On 26 May 1960 at a large political rally at Meyerton, Transvaal, as quoted by David Harrison in The White Tribe of Africa https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=LgwWMUbyNVUC, University of California Press, 1983, p. 165.

Peace, Country, People, World

“Compliance with an authority is ingrained in the human condition. Statists of all stripes use this psychological technique to garner support for political conquests, domestic and foreign. These conquests mimic the historical policies of Italian Fascism, German National Socialism, and Russian Sovietism, which few scholars want to expose, especially when their own ideology stands in sharp accord with Fascist-Marxist mindset. Yet many political scientists go out of their way to misidentify or ignore the roots of Mussolini’s syndicalist, socialist, and Marxist ideology, perhaps because of their own closely held political beliefs. Whatever the reason, scholars have gone to great lengths to obscure Mussolini’s true Marxian intentions.”

L. K. Samuels (1951) American writer

Source: Killing History: The False Left-Right Political Spectrum and the Battle between the ‘Free Left’ and the ‘Statist Left', (2019), p. 121

Way, Support

“The psychology of the religious experience has been well-researched and taped. There are many paths up the mountain—sensory deprivation or sensory overload—emotional response to stimuli or the lack thereof is common. Drugs, of course, from psychoactives to the more mundane depressants. Electropophy can bring it about, as can organic brain damage, lack or excess of oxygen, even sex can trigger it. And what it is, according to the science of man and mue, is a subjective mental state, somewhere to the left of hypnosis. A trick the mind plays on itself. A delusion, void of reality.”

Steve Perry book The Man Who Never Missed

Source: The Man Who Never Missed (1985), Chapter 7 (pp. 56-57)

Sex, Science, Reality, Mountain

“For applied psychology, whether American or German, it never had the slightest appeal, as is shown by the figures for the relevant journals, Zeitschrift fiir angewandte Psychologie, Journal of Applied Psychology, and Journal of Educational Psychology.”

Kurt Danziger (1926) German academic

Applied psychology had committed itself to knowledge goals that were unlikely to be advanced by the kind of investigative practice associated with Wundt's laboratory. What it was after was knowledge that could be quickly utilized by agencies of social control so as to make their work more efficient and more rationally defensible.
66
Constructing the subject: Historical origins of psychological research. 1994

Education

“THE subject I have been given for these lectures is The Psychological Foundations of Business Administration, but as it is obvious that we cannot in four papers consider all the contributions which contemporary psychology is making to business administration — to the methods of hiring, promoting and discharging, to the consideration of incentives, the relation of output to motive, to group organization, etc.”

Mary Parker Follett (1868–1933) American academic

I have chosen certain subjects which seem to me to go to the heart of personnel relations in industry. I wish to consider in this paper the most fruitful way of dealing with conflict. At the outset I should like to ask you to agree for the moment to think of conflict as neither good nor bad; to consider it without ethical prejudgment; to think of it not as warfare, but as the appearance of difference, difference of opinions, of interests. For that is what conflict means — difference. We shall not consider merely the differences between employer and employee, but those between managers, between the directors at the Board meetings, or wherever difference appears.
Source: Dynamic administration, 1942, p. 1. Lead paragraph

Motivation, Business, Making love, Relation ships

“We now come to the underpinning contention of the previous monograph. Psychological phenomena, especially those involved in learning and education, stem from or are related to states of consciousness.”

Gordon Pask (1928–1996) British psychologist

Using the argument which relates the information available about conscious processes to the type of experimental situation, we maintain that the basic unit of psychological /educational observation is a conversation. In order to test hypotheses and explicate the conversational transactions, it is necessary to invoke various tools and explanatory constructs. These are coherent enough to count when interlocked as a theory, and this theory was dubbed conversation theory.
Source: Conversation Theory (1976), p. 3.

Education, Relation ships, Learning

“The interesting thing is what happens in the specific picture: its precision in terms of the sensations it produces — the illusion it creates and the effect of this illusion on the psychology opposed to it. General philosophical and technical information however interesting in itself is secondary to this reality.”

Patrick Swift (1927–1983) British artist

X magazine (1959-62)

Reality

“A highly competent Bitch often deprecates herself by refusing to recognize her own superiority…. Bitches are among the most unsung of the unsung heroes of this society. They are the pioneers, the vanguard, the spearhead. Whether they want to be or not this is the role they serve just by their very being. Many would not choose to be the groundbreakers for the mass of women for whom they have no sisterly feelings but they cannot avoid it. Those who violate the limits, extend them; or cause the system to break…. Their major psychological oppression is not a belief that they are inferior but a belief that they are not…. Like most women they were taught to hate themselves as well as all women. In different ways and for different reasons perhaps, but the effect was similar. Internalization of a derogatory self-concept always results in a good deal of bitterness and resentment. This anger is usually either turned in on the self —making one an unpleasant person or on other women — reinforcing the social cliches about them. Only with political consciousness is it directed at the source — the social system…. We must be strong, we must be militant, we must be dangerous. We must realize that Bitch is Beautiful and that we have nothing to lose. Nothing whatsoever.”

Jo Freeman (1945) writer, lawyer

The BITCH Manifesto (Fall, 1968, © 1969) http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/bitch.htm, as accessed Aug. 22, 2010 (also published as Joreen, The Bitch Manifesto, in Notes From the Second Year (N.Y.: Shulamith Firestone & Anne Koedt, 1970))

Anger, Hate, Personality, Beauty

“She writes well and concisely, and this has tended to obscure the psychological superficiality and sheer petty malice of her content.”

Muriel Spark (1918–2006) Scottish writer

Martin Seymour-Smith, Guide to Modern World Literature, (London: Hodder & Stoughton, [1973] 1975), vol. 1, p. 333.
About

“Convictions following the admission into evidence of confessions which are involuntary, i. e., the product of coercion, either physical or psychological, cannot stand. This is so not because such confessions are unlikely to be true but because the methods used to extract them offend an underlying principle in the enforcement of our criminal law: that ours is an accusatorial and not an inquisitorial system — a system in which the State must establish guilt by evidence independently and freely secured and may not by coercion prove its charges against an accused out of his own mouth.”

Felix Frankfurter (1882–1965) American judge

Rogers v. Richmond, 365 U.S. 534, 540-41 (1961).
Judicial opinions

Law

“Of the Beat triumvirate, Kerouac was probably both the most pathetic and least noxious. Psychologically, he was a mess—as indeed were Ginsberg and Burroughs. But, unlike them, Kerouac lacked the knack of sanctifying his pathologies and inducing others to bow down in obeisance.”

Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) American poet

Roger Kimball, "A gospel of emancipation", The New Criterion, October 1997

“It is hardly necessary for me to say that I do not believe in the supernatural; everything that happened has a perfectly rational explanation, obvious to any man with the slightest knowledge of psychology.”

Arthur C. Clarke book Dog Star

Dog Star, p. 786
2000s and posthumous publications, The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke (2001)

Knowledge

“Don’t fool yourself that you are going to have it all. You are not. Psychologically, having it all is not even a valid concept. The marvelous thing about human beings is that we are perpetually reaching for the stars. The more we have, the more we want. And for this reason, we never have it all.”

Joyce Brothers (1927–2013) Joyce Brothers

The Successful Woman : How You Can Have a Career, a Husband, and a Family — and Not Feel Guilty About It (1988), p. 18

Star, Fools

“This psychological phenomenon was brought about mainly by the efforts of two men... Thomas Henry Huxley and Ernst Heinrich Haeckel. Both were fervent Darwinists... These two men were exceedingly able; but they spoke with the voice of authority on subjects which they themselves, in many particulars, were merely guessing at. These conclusions are not mine alone. They are also the conclusions of many scientific researchers and thinkers of today.”

Gottfried de Purucker (1874–1942) Author, Theosophist

Ch 3
Man in Evolution (1941)

Men, Effort

“The psychology of the times following the publication of Darwin's works was so strong that most thinking men could not then be brought to admit that there were any alternative explanations of the phenomena of progressive development in life — human, animal, or plant life — to the scheme of transformism which he set forth.”

Gottfried de Purucker (1874–1942) Author, Theosophist

Ch 3
Man in Evolution (1941)

Time, Strong, Animals, Thinking

“The first step, then, is the most important: to realize you have a remarkable social tool that you are not cultivating. The best way to see this is to try it out. Stop your incessant interior monologue and pay deeper attention to people. Attune yourself to the shifting moods of individuals and the group. Get a read on each person’s particular psychology and what motivates them. Try to take their perspective, enter their world and value system. You will suddenly become aware of an entire world of nonverbal behavior you never knew existed, as if your eyes could now suddenly see ultraviolet light. Once you sense this power, you will feel its importance and awaken to new social possibilities.”

Robert Greene (1959) American author

Chap. 2 : Transform Self-love into Empathy
The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

Reading, Light, Personality, People

“People may point to all of this as evidence that we humans are becoming more honest and truthful, but human nature does not change within a few generations. People have become more obvious and forthright not out of some deep moral calling but out of increasing self-absorption and overall laziness. It requires no effort to simply be oneself or to blast one’s message. And the lack of effort simply results in a lack of effect on other people’s psychology. It means that people’s interest in you will be paper thin. Their attention will quickly move on and you will not see the reason for this. Do not swallow the easy moralism of the day, which urges honesty at the expense of desirability. Go in the opposite direction. With so few people out there who understand the art of desirability, it affords you endless opportunities to shine and exploit people’s repressed fantasies.”

Robert Greene (1959) American author

Chap. 5 : Become an Elusive Object of Desire
The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

Understanding, People, Art, Nature

“All too often our personality is nothing more than psychological clothing that we wear to hide our true self from the world.”

Teal Swan (1984) American spiritual teacher

World, Personality, Clothes, Self-confidence

“We must distinguish between military and political power.
Political power is a psychological relation between those who exercise it and those over whom it is exercised. It gives the former control over certain actions of the latter through the influence which the former exert over the latter's minds. That influence may be exerted through orders, threats, persuasion, or a combination of any of these.”

Hans Morgenthau book Politics Among Nations

Source: Politics Among Nations (1948), p. 27 (1954 edition)

Relation ships, Exercises

“What lies behind the complaint about the dearth of civil courage? In recent years we have seen a great deal of bravery and self-sacrifice, but civil courage hardly anywhere, even among ourselves. To attribute this simply to personal cowardice would be too facile a psychology; its background is quite different. In a long history, we Germans have had to learn the need for and the strength of obedience. In the subordination of all personal wishes and ideas to the tasks to which we have been called, we have seen the meaning and greatness of our lives. We have looked upwards, not in servile fear, but in free trust, seeing in our tasks a call, and in our call a vocation. This readiness to follow a command from "above" rather than our own private opinions and wishes was a sign of legitimate self-distrust. Who would deny that in obedience, in their task and calling, the Germans have again and again shown the utmost bravery and self-sacrifice? But the German has kept his freedom — and what nation has talked more passionately of freedom than the Germans, from Luther to the idealist philosophers?”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) German Lutheran pastor, theologian, dissident anti-Nazi

by seeking deliverance from self-will through service to the community. Calling and freedom were to him two sides of the same thing. But in this he misjudged the world; he did not realize that his submissiveness and self-sacrifice could be exploited for evil ends. When that happened, the exercise of the calling itself became questionable, and all the moral principles of the German were bound to totter. The fact could not be escaped that the Germans still lacked something fundamental: he could not see the need for free and responsible action, even in opposition to the task and his calling; in its place there appeared on the one hand an irresponsible lack of scruple, and on the other a self-tormenting punctiliousness that never led to action. Civil courage, in fact, can grow only out of the free responsibility of free men. Only now are the Germans beginning to discover the meaning of free responsibility. It depends on a God who demands responsible action in a bold venture of faith, and who promises forgiveness and consolation to the man who becomes a sinner in that venture.
Source: Letters and Papers from Prison (1967; 1997), Civil Courage, p. 5

Courage, History, Freedom, Personality

“In any case it is evident that there is a psychology as well as a sociology of handwriting. Tremendously complicated as the problem of diagnosis of individual traits from those tiny strokes of the pen appears, it is yet a legitimate problem of science; for the more progress psychology makes, the more evident it becomes that there is not a mode of expression which is not rooted to its finest detail in the complex psycho-physical organism. Meanwhile, it is fortunate that the task of identifying graphic signs should not be left wholly to the intuitions of the graphologist. Experimental work that seeks to induce variation in writing through a control of outer conditions must in time correlate certain definite variations in conditions with variation in such aspects of writing as size, speed, accuracy in alignment, inequality of control and the like.”

June Downey (1875–1932) American psychologist

August 1909, Popular Science Monthly Volume 75, Article:"The Varificational Factor in Handwriting", p. 150-151
about Handwriting

Time, Speed, Problem, Appearance

“As we shall see, there have always been two "bodies" of the American dream. One, the dream of tangibles, focuses on material well-being and practical, everyday freedoms. The other, like an etheric body extending from the material dream, seeks psychological liberation—a goal at once more essential and more elusive. The proponents of the latter dream have nearly always come from the comfortable social classes. Having achieved the first measure of freedom, they hunger for the second.”

Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) American writer

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Five, The American Matrix for Transformation

Hunger, Dreams, Freedom

“Even the most superficial of a newspaper reveals an important aspect of human psychology: our preoccupation with the short term.”

John Allen Paulos book A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper

Source: A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper (1995), Chapter 21, “Researchers Look to Local News for Trends” (p. 96)

“There are heroes in education, as there have always been heroes, trying to transcend the limits of the old structure; but their efforts are too often thwarted by peers, administrators, parents. Mario Fantini, former Ford consultant on education, now at the State University of New York, said bluntly, The psychology of becoming has to be smuggled into the schools.”

Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) American writer

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Nine, Flying and Seeing: New Ways to Learn

School, Universe, Parent, Education

“I have often pondered the psychology of people who seem uncomfortable with the society that has formed them. There is much about Australia I would like to change, but not its fundamentals.”

Tony Abbott (1957) Australian politician

Source: Leader of the Opposition (2009-2015), Battlelines book, (2013), p. 6.

People, Change

“I think that art helps evaluate some of the psychology of yourself as a child, and to illuminate some things you may never have understood.”

Lucy Liu (1968) American actress and model

On the power of art in “Lucy Liu on making art to find a sense of belonging” https://www.cnn.com/style/article/lucy-liu-artsy/index.html in CNN (2019 Nov 28)

Thinking, Help, Art

“..Painting never means just never picturing the material things, but it is a psychological function, an expression of how his mind [of the artist] responds to things. So that is quite a difference with: painting is showing the beauty of things.”

Jan Mankes (1889–1920) Dutch painter

translation from original Dutch: Fons Heijnsbroek (original Dutch: citaat van Jan Mankes, in het Nederlands:) Schilderen is.. ..nooit een afbeelding geven der stoffelijke zaken, maar een psychische functie, een uiten hoe zijn geest [van de kunstenaar] reageert ten opzichte der dingen. Dat is dus een heel verschil met: schilderen is de schoonheid der dingen laten zien. Quote of Jan Mankes in a letter to his maceneas A.A.M. Pauwels in The Hague; as cited by J.R. de Groot in 'De bekoring van het gewone - Het werk van Jan Mankes https://www.dbnl.org/tekst/_ons003199001_01/_ons003199001_01_0014.php', p. 102 undated quotes

Beauty, Painting

“The play is my gut's response to stories that have to do with my own bloodline. I think it is a great luxury and adventure to be able to dive into one's own history, one's own lineage, psychology and story, and illumine and at the same time fictionalize it.”

Philip Kan Gotanda (1951) American film director and playwright

On his play Yachiyo in “Family Secret Revealed on Stage / Philip Kan Gotanda tells tragic story of aunt he never knew in `Yachiyo'” https://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/Family-Secret-Revealed-on-Stage-Philip-Kan-3020373.php in SF Gate (1995 Nov 5)

Thinking, Time, History

“We, the Androgynes of the world, have formed this responsible corporate body to demonstrate by our efforts that our physiological and psychological handicaps need be no deterrent in integrating 10% of the world's population towards the constructive social progress of mankind.”

Harry Hay (1912–2002) American gay rights activist

"We, the Androgynes of the World" (July 7th, 1950)

Radically Gay: Gay Liberation in the words of its Founder (1996)

World, Effort

“I don't know which way human psychology will go wrong. We have a world in which there is uncertainty. There are new technologies. And one of the problems is that we do things today with a thought to the future. Any purchase is one for the future. If you buy a refrigerator you are making a commitment to the future, so that you have food to eat for the next ten years. That's a simple theory, one of many simple theories -- theories that people agree on and that don't, in a fundamental way, change. But every once in a while there is unemployment, and wages will drop, and there will be several different interpretations.”

Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) American economist

quoted in Conor Clarke, An Interview with Kenneth Arrow, Part One https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2009/07/an-interview-with-kenneth-arrow-part-one/22213/ (2009) New millennium

Food, Future, People, Problem

“Fact is, nothing can justify our existence. Existence of any flavor is not only unjustified, it is useless, malignantly so, and has nothing to recommend it over nonexistence. A person’s addiction to existence is understandable as a telltale of the fear of nonexistence, but one’s psychology as a being that already exists does not justify existence as a condition to be perpetuated but only explains why someone would want to perpetuate it. For the same reason, even eternal bliss in a holy hereafter is unjustified, since it is just another form of existence, another instance in which the unjustifiable is perpetuated. That anyone should have a bias for heaven over nonexistence should by rights be condemned as hedonistic by the same people who scoff at Schopenhauer for complaining about the disparity between “the effort and the reward” in human life. People may believe they can choose any number of things. But they cannot choose to undo their existence, leaving them to live and die as puppets who have had an existence forced upon them whose edicts they must follow. If you are already among the existent, anything you do will be unjustified and MALIGNANTLY USELESS.”

Thomas Ligotti (1953) American horror author

The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror (2010)

Fear, Understanding, Personality, People

“And when boys are hurt, they hurt us—physically, psychologically, and economically.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Source: The Boy Crisis (2018), pp. 106

Hurt, Boy

“The women who were best able to grow spiritually and psychologically had married men who were the least able to grow.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Source: The Boy Crisis (2018), pp. 71

Women, Men

“We are told by physicians and scientists that thousands of cells in the human brain are still dormant and, consequently, that the average human being uses only a small part of his equipment. The area of the brain which is found around the pineal gland is that connected with the intuition, and it is these cells which must be roused into activity before there can be any real intuitive perception which, when aroused, will manifest soul control, spiritual illumination, true psychological understanding of one's fellowmen, and a development of the true esoteric sense, which is the objective before you at this time.”

Alice A. Bailey (1880–1949) esoteric, theosophist, writer

Source: Glamour: A World Problem (1950), Certain Preliminary Clarifications, p. 2

Soul, Time, Understanding, Sense

“Lynchings in the past have significantly shaped race relations in the present. A killing such as George Floyd’s lands on black people with a much heavier psychological weight because of lynching’s legacy. Too many white people fail to recognize this, and that needs to change. The hurt is too great, the simmering fear and anger too volatile, to bury forever. All Americans who would seek or demand a nation that is fairer to every citizen, less racist, and more peaceful have a responsibility to know this history in detail. … Confronting this ugliness would be difficult for everyone, of course, but it should be attempted. Ignorance and denial certainly have not worked, because this American wound still bleeds.”

Guy P. Harrison (1963) American skeptic author

Hurt, Peace, Anger, History

“There is a Path which leads to that which is known as Initiation, and through Initiation to the Perfecting of Man; a Path which is recognized in all the great religions, and the chief features of which are described in similar terms in every one of the great faiths of the world. You may read of it in the Roman Catholic teachings as divided into three parts: (1) The Path of Purification or Purgation; (2) the Path of Illumination; and (3) the Path of Union with Divinity. You find it among the Mussulmans in the Sufi — the mystic — teachings of Islam, where it is known under the names of the Way, the Truth and the Life. You find it further eastward still in the great faith of Buddhism, divided into subdivisions, though these can be classified under the broader outline. It is similarly divided in Hinduism; for in both those great religions, in which the study of psychology, of the human mind and the human constitution, has played so great a part, you find a more definite subdivision. But really it matters not to which faith you turn; it matters not which particular set of names you choose as best attracting or expressing your own ideas; the Path is but one; its divisions are always the same; from time immemorial that Path has stretched from the life of the world to the life of the Divine.”

Annie Besant (1847–1933) British socialist, theosophist, women's rights activist, writer and orator

Source: Initiation, The Perfecting of Man (1923)

Faith, Religion, Study, Time

“Study in one school of psychology came to what seemed a terrible conclusion. It was the school of Lombroso in Italy. He declared, and many others followed him, that the visions of the prophets, of the saints, of the seers, all their testimony to the existence of superphysical worlds, were the products of disordered brains, of diseased or over-strained nervous apparatus. He went further, and he declared that the manifestation known as genius was closely allied to insanity, that the brain of the genius and the brain of the madman were akin, until the phrase "genius is allied to madness," became the stock axiom of that school.”

Annie Besant (1847–1933) British socialist, theosophist, women's rights activist, writer and orator

Source: Essays and Addresses, Vol. III- Evolution and Occultism (1913)

School, Study, World, Madness

“There was no question that I was deeply afraid of what might happen to me if the "condition" continued. I was much more concerned about the possibility of a growing mental illness than a physical deterioration. I had studied enough psychology and had enough psychologist and psychiatrist friends to compound such fears. Moreover, I was afraid to discuss the matter with these friends. I was afraid that I would then be classified as their "patients," and lose the closeness that equality (normalcy) brings. Non-professional friends in business and community would be worse. I would be labeled a freak or psychotic, which could seriously affect my life and the lives of those close to me. Finally, it seemed to be something to keep from my family. It seemed unnecessary that they worry along with me.”

Robert Monroe (1915–1995) American founder of The Monroe Institute

Journeys Out of the Body (1971), Chapter 2. Search and Research

Family, Life, Study, Question

“Revelation is the fulgurant irruption of a knowledge that comes, not from an individual or collective subconscious, but on the contrary from a supra-consciousness, which though latent in all beings nonetheless immensely surpasses its individual and psychological crystallizations.”

Frithjof Schuon (1907–1998) Swiss philosopher

[2006, Light on the Ancient Worlds, World Wisdom, 117, 978-0-941532-72-3]
Miscellaneous, Revelation

Knowledge

“One who practices psychological violence against others is usually a devious, damned cowardly and disgustingly treacherous person.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

Original: Colui che pratica violenza psicologica contro gli altri di solito è una persona subdola, dannatamente codarda e disgustosamente infida.
Source: prevale.net

Personality

“I do not mean to deny the biologic, physiologic, or psychologic factors in creating crime; but there is hardly an advanced criminologist who will not concede that the social and economic influences are the most relentless, the most poisonous germs of crime.”

Emma Goldman book Anarchism and Other Essays

Anarchism and Other Essays (1910), Prisons: A Social Crime and Failure

“Here too, we can see that not being open to learning something new does not automatically make someone a narcissist. In fact, a narcissist is required to be more knowledgeable in many fields; mostly in psychology.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

Learning, Knowledge

“Most of the narcissists are geniuses and masters of Psychology. But they are using their knowledge to eradicate, rather than to help humanity.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

Help, Knowledge

“Using the psychological language—Some people are less rational than others, because they are caught up in BEING instead of focusing in BECOMING too. Time is continuous.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

Time, People

“There’s a certain step-by-step logic, inherent in human nature and the peculiarities of human psychology, which ensures that Man will always organize into the largest possible group. Civilization is inevitable, if you want a pat phrase.”

Algis Budrys (1931–2008) American writer

Source: Some Will Not Die (1961), Chapter 5 (p. 82)

Nature

“The subject of learning lies in the provinces of neuroscience and psychology. It is the opposite of instinct. Instinct is generically-determined behaviour; learning is behaviour modified by experience.”

Matt Ridley book Genome

Source: Genome (1999), Chapter 16 “Memory” (p. 220)

Learning

“Having too many choices produces psychological distress, especially when combined with regret, concern about status, adaptation, social comparison, and perhaps most important, the desire to have the best of everything—to maximize.”

Barry Schwartz book The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

The Paradox of Choice (2004)

“[C]hoice in many facets of our life has gone from implicit and often psychologically unreal to explicit and psychologically very real.”

Barry Schwartz book The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

The Paradox of Choice (2004)

Life

“The nation has come to the end of its psychological endurance. Many people are beginning to despair. Now it is not days but hours that separate us from a national catastrophe. Honesty compels one to ask the question: Did things have to come to this?”

Wojciech Jaruzelski (1923–2014) Polish military officer and politician

Source: Excerpts of Martial law speech (14 December 1981)

People, Despair, Question

“A being who can look without weeping on the heart-rending facts that fill the cities of our so-called civilisation has a psychology granitic enough to gaze unmoved on a hellful of roasting souls.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

Source: The New Ethics (1907), Human Attitude Toward Others, p. 45

Soul, Hell, Heart

“Psychology. The Science of Soul, in days of old: a Science which served as the unavoidable basis for physiology. Whereas in our modern day, it is psychology that is being based (by our great scientists) upon physiology.”

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831–1891) occult writer

Source: The Theosophical Glossary (1892)

Soul, Science

“Hindu mythology is virtually a large scale projection into the psychological realm of microscopic scientific discoveries." "The Wu Li Masters know that physicists are doing more than discovering the endless diversity of nature.'”

Gary Zukav book The Dancing Wu Li Masters

They are dancing with Kali, the Divine Mother of Hindu mythology." The Dancing Wu Li Masters (1979) Source: Zukav, Gary The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics Bantam (September 1, 1984)ASIN 0553249142 as quoted in Londhe, S. (2008). A tribute to Hinduism: Thoughts and wisdom spanning continents and time about India and her culture https://books.google.com/books/about/A_Tribute_to_Hinduism.html?id=G3AMAQAAMAAJ

Nature

“Because physical theories typically predict numerical values, an improvement in experimental precision reduces the tolerance range and hence increases corroborability. In most psychological research, improved power of a statistical design leads to a prior probability approaching ½ of finding a significant difference in the theoretically predicted direction. Hence the corroboration yielded by "success" is very weak, and becomes weaker with increased precision. "Statistical significance" plays a logical role in psychology precisely the reverse of its role in physics. This problem is worsened by certain unhealthy tendencies prevalent among psychologists, such as a premium placed on experimental "cuteness" and a free reliance upon ad hoc explanations to avoid refutation.”

Paul E. Meehl (1920–2003) American psychologist

Source: [Theory-testing in psychology and physics: A methodological paradox, Philosophy of Science, 34, 2, 1967, 103–115, https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/288135]

Problem, Success

“We shouldn't take information tranquilizers. Because sometimes information is spread about some moral and psychological breakdown in the Ukrainian armed forces, which are allegedly on the verge of some kind of crisis in moral and so on. All of that, to put it mildly, is false.”

Mikhail Khodaryonok (1954) Colonel of the Russian Armed Forces

Falseness

“Modern psychology has a word that is probably used more than any other word in psychology. It is the word "maladjusted."”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

Certainly we all want to live the well adjusted life in order to avoid neurotic and schizophrenic personalities. But I must honestly say to you tonight my friends that there are some things in our world, there are some things in our nation to which I'm proud to be maladjusted, to which I call upon all men of goodwill to be maladjusted until the good society is realized. I must honestly say to you that I never intend to adjust myself to segregation and discrimination. I never intend to become adjusted to religious bigotry. I never intend to adjust myself to economic conditions that will take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few. I never intend to adjust myself to the madness of militarism and the self defeating effects of physical violence.
1960s, Keep Moving From This Mountain (1965)

“Modern psychology recognizes what Jesus taught centuries ago: Hate divides the personality and love in an amazing and inexorable way unites it.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1950s, Loving Your Enemies (Christmas 1957)

Hate, Personality, Way, Love

“Economics was like psychology, a pseudoscience trying to hide that fact with intense theoretical hyperelaboration. And gross domestic product was one of those unfortunate measurement concepts, like inches or the British thermal unit, that ought to have been retired long before.”

Kim Stanley Robinson (1952) American science fiction writer

Source: Blue Mars (1996), Chapter 2, “Areophany” (p. 80)

“Continuous expansion is a fundamental tenet of economics. Therefore one of the fundamentals of the universe itself. Because everything is economics. Physics is cosmic economics, biology is cellular economics, the humanities are social economics, psychology is mental economics, and so on.”

Kim Stanley Robinson book Green Mars

His listeners nodded unhappily.
“So everything is expanding. But it can’t happen in contradiction to the law of conservation of matter-energy. No matter how efficient your throughput is, you can’t get an output larger than the input.”
Source: Green Mars (1993), Chapter 2, “The Ambassador” (pp. 76-77)

Universe

“Religious man was born to be saved, psychological man is born to be pleased.”

Philip Rieff (1922–2006) American sociologist

Source: The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud

“Doing good to others will make you feel like a better person: physically, psychologically and spiritually. Maybe gestures like this don't cost you anything, but for those who receive them… they have great value.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

Original: Fare del bene agli altri ti farà sentire una persona migliore: fisicamente, psicologicamente e spiritualmente. Magari gesti così non ti costano nulla, ma per chi li riceve... hanno un grande valore.
Source: prevale.net

Personality, Feeling

Quotes about psychology page 10

Quotes about psychology
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