33 quotes
One of the goals of education should be to teach that life is precious.
Motivation and Personality (1954)
A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be.
Freedom, love, community feeling, respect, philosophy, may all be waved aside as fripperies that are useless since they fail to fill the stomach.
Motivation and Personality (1954)
For our chronically and extremely hungry man, Utopia can be defined simply as a place where there is plenty of food.
Motivation and Personality (1954)
This tendency might be phrased as the desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming.
Motivation and Personality (1954)
Love, safety, belongingness and respect from other people are almost panaceas for the situational disturbances and even for some of the mild character disturbances.
Motivation and Personality (1954)
Human beings seem to be far more autonomous and self-governed than modern psychological theory allows for.
Motivation and Personality (1954)
The good or healthy society would then be defined as one that permitted people's highest purposes to emerge by satisfying all their basic needs.
Motivation and Personality (1954)
If swindling pays, then it will not stop. The definition of the good society is one in which virtue pays.
Eupsychian Management: A Journal (1965)
I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.
The Psychology of Science: A Reconnaissance (1966)
Emergency conditions are, almost by definition, rare in the normally functioning peaceful society.
Motivation and Personality (1954)
The loss of illusions and the discovery of identity, though painful at first, can be ultimately exhilarating and strengthening.
The concept of the well-adjusted personality or of good adjustment sets a low ceiling upon the possibility for advancement and for growth. The cow, the slave, the robot may all be well adjusted.
Motivation and Personality (1954)
Secrecy, censorship, dishonesty, and blocking of communication threaten all the basic needs.
Motivation and Personality (1954)
Education is learning to grow, learning what to grow toward, learning what is good and bad, learning what is desirable and undesirable, learning what to choose and what not to choose.
The Farther Reaches of Human Nature (1971)
Human nature is not nearly as bad as it has been thought to be... In fact it can be said that the possibilities of human nature have customarily been sold short.
It is too often not realized that culture itself is an adaptive tool, one of whose main functions is to make the physiological emergencies come less and less often.
Adjusted to what? To a bad culture? To a dominating parent? What shall we think of a well-adjusted slave? A well-adjusted prisoner?
Personality Problems and Personality Growth (1956)
Clearly what will be called personality problems depends on who is doing the calling. The slave owner? The dictator? The patriarchal father? The husband who wants his wife to remain a child?
Personality Problems and Personality Growth (1956)
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.