Psychology Quotes – Insights and Reflections

"The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior ‚righteous indignation‘ — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats."

Aldous Huxley

"The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth."

Aldous Huxley

"Whoever controls the media, controls the mind, the medium is the message and the message is me"

Jim Morrison

"A lie told often enough becomes the truth."

Vladimir Lenin

"National Socialism imposed itself cautiously, in small doses – always waiting just a bit until the conscience of the world could bear the next dose."

Stefan Zweig

"Delusions, carefully implanted, are difficult to correct."

Joost A.M. Meerloo

"Though it is disguised by the illusion that a bureaucracy accountable to a majority of voters, and susceptible to the pressure of organized minorities, is not exercising compulsion, it is evident that the more varied and comprehensive the regulation becomes, the more the state becomes a despotic power as against the individual. For the fragment of control over the government which he exercises through his vote is in no effective sense proportionate to the authority exercised over him by the government."

Walter Lippmann

"In der Tat wird es immer offensichtlicher, dass nicht Hungersnöte, nicht Erdbeben, nicht Mikroben, nicht Krebs, sondern der Mensch selbst die größte Gefahr für den Menschen darstellt, und zwar aus dem einfachen Grund, dass es keinen angemessenen Schutz gegen psychische Epidemien gibt, die unendlich viel verheerender sind als die schlimmsten Naturkatastrophen"

Carl Gustav Jung

"We are all captives of the picture in our head – our belief that the world we have experienced is the world that really exists."

Walter Lippmann

"Knowing that we can be loved exactly as we are gives us all the best opportunity for growing into the healthiest of people."

Fred McFeely Rogers

"Comparing is the end of happiness and the beginning of dissatisfaction"

Søren Kierkegaard

"Do not spend time looking for an obstacle. Perhaps there is none."

Franz Kafka

"The public will believe anything, so long as it is not founded on truth."

Dame Edith Louisa Sitwell

"It is often disturbing to see how even intelligent people do not have straight thinking minds of their own. The pattern of the mind, whether toward conformity and compliance or otherwise, is conditioned rather early in life."

Joost A.M. Meerloo

"Language is the source of misunderstandings."

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

"Most managers were trained to be the thing they most despise - bureaucrats."

Alvin Toffler

"I was a scared kid... I think I was born a nervous wreck, and I think movies were one way to find a way transferring my own private horrors to everyone else's lives. It was less of an escape and more of an exorcism."

Steven Spielberg

"Well now, I believe we are much less stupid than it seems. We are trained not to think. Formulas are drilled into us, which we parrot.

But I believe that if the desire for true happiness, for true knowledge were to fully awaken among people in society – what the Enlightenment called with Kant's words: Sapere aude! Dare to know! – and not to consume canned wisdom that someone else has cooked and served, and then even experienced oneself as if I had thought such a thing...

I believe that tremendous change could be achieved.

People are not that stupid at all. But it is dangerous not to be stupid. Because if you are not stupid, you contradict, criticize, express unpopular opinions. And for safety reasons, it is better to appear stupid."

Erich Fromm