Carol Tavris Quotes

#1. For some of the large indignities of life, the best remedy is direct action. For the small indignities, the best remedy is a Charlie Chaplin movie. The hard part is knowing the difference.

Carol Tavris

#2. God is in the truth.

Carol Tavris

#3. There are plenty of good reasons for admitting mistakes, starting with the simple likelihood that you will probably be found out anyway - by

Carol Tavris

#4. What, then, was the new strategy he proposed? More troops and more money. For him, any other option was unthinkable. It would mean he had made a colossal mistake.

Carol Tavris

#5. The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none. - historian and essayist Thomas Carlyle

Carol Tavris

#6. A president who justifies his actions to the public might be induced to change them. A president who justifies his actions to himself, believing that he has the truth, is impervious to self-correction.

Carol Tavris

#7. In the horrifying calculus of self-deception, the greater the pain we inflict on others, the greater the need to justify it to maintain our feelings of decency and self-worth.

Carol Tavris

#8. When it comes to food, there are two large categories of eaters, those who do not worry about what they eat but should, and those who do worry about what they eat but should not.

Carol Tavris

#9. Severe initiations increase a member's liking for the group.

Carol Tavris

#10. Baseball lasts as long as it takes. Like life, like love, baseball exists in real time.

Carol Tavris

#11. A fan without a team is like a hog without truffles - she has nothing to root for.

Carol Tavris

#12. Depression is not 'anger turned inward'; if anything, anger is depression turned outward. Follow the trail of anger inward, and there you will find the small, still voice of pain.

Carol Tavris

#13. The history of the women's movement in America follows a consciousness-amnesia cycle.

Carol Tavris

#14. Many books in popular psychology are a melange of the author's comments, a dollop of research, and stupefyingly dull transcriptions from interviews.

Carol Tavris

#15. The second-sweetest set of three words in English is 'I don't know.'

Carol Tavris

#16. It's the people who almost decide to live in glass houses who throw the first stones.

Carol Tavris

#17. [Sexual] fantasies, like children, are most interesting to the people who have them.

Carol Tavris

#18. Nothing predicts future behavior as much as past impunity.

Carol Tavris

#19. History is written by the victors, but it's victims who write the memoirs.

Carol Tavris

#20. During McCarthyism, teachers feared for their jobs if they belonged to a left-wing group. Today teachers fear for their jobs if they hug a crying child. As in all moral panics, an accusation is enough to destroy a person's life. Hysteria trumps evidence.

Carol Tavris

#21. The trouble is that once people develop an implicit theory, the confirmation bias kicks in and they stop seeing evidence that doesn't fit it.

Carol Tavris

#22. No one really knows human nature, men as well as women, who has not lived in the bondage of marriage, that is to say, the enforced study of a fellow creature.

Carol Tavris

#23. To resolve the dissonance between "I love this person" and "This person is doing some things that are driving me crazy" will enhance their love story or destroy it.

Carol Tavris

#24. No one seems to have learned, or can remember, the magic words that calm people when they are frightened or threatened: "I'm sorry; I didn't see you; are you all right?" The inability to speak these words, I observe, goes right along with a propensity for mindless insults.

Carol Tavris

#25. In sports as in child rearing, marital arguments, or tantrums, the same laws of learning apply; when an emotion is encouraged and the rules permit it, it is perpetuated, not 'drained.' ... An emotion without social rules of containment and expression is like an egg without a shell: a gooey mess ...

Carol Tavris

#26. Consider the famous syllogism "All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore Socrates is mortal." So far, so good. But just because all men are mortal, it does not follow that all mortals are men, and it certainly does not follow that all men are Socrates.

Carol Tavris

#27. Doubt is not the enemy of justice; overconfidence is.

Carol Tavris

#28. Even irrefutable evidence is rarely enough to pierce the mental armor of self-justification.

Carol Tavris

#29. And thus they selectively remember parts of their life, focusing on those parts that support their own points of view.

Carol Tavris

#30. We need a few trusted naysayers in our lives, critics who are willing to puncture our protective bubble of self-justifications and yank us back to reality if we veer too far off. This is especially important for people in positions of power.

Carol Tavris