Gordon Allport Quotes

#1. The scientist, by the very nature of his commitment, creates more and more questions, never fewer. Indeed the measure of our intellectual maturity, one philosopher suggests, is our capacity to feel less and less satisfied with our answers to better problems.

Gordon Allport

#2. Reason adapts impulses and beliefs into the real world; rationalization, on the other hand, adapts the concept of reality to the impulses and beliefs of the individual. Reasoning discovers the true cause of our acts, rationalization finds good reasons for justifying our acts.

Gordon Allport

#3. Thwarted lives have the most character-conditioned hate

Gordon Allport

#4. Prejudgments become prejudices only if they are not reversible when exposed to new knowledge.

Gordon Allport

#5. Life is too short so we must generalize.

Gordon Allport

#6. The mature religious sentiment is ordinarily fashioned in the workshop of doubt.

Gordon Allport

#7. Many studies have discovered a close link between prejudice and "patriotism" ... Extreme bigots are almost always super-patriots.

Gordon Allport

#8. Since we think about ourselves so much of the time, it is comforting to assume ... that we really know the score ... [But] this is not an easy assignment. [As] Santayana wrote, 'Nothing requires a rarer intellectual heroism than willingness to see one's equation written out.'

Gordon Allport

#9. Personality is and does something ... It is what lies behind specific acts and within the individual

Gordon Allport

#10. People who are aware of, and ashamed of, their prejudices are well on the road to eliminating them.

Gordon Allport

#11. The theist is persuaded that while nothing that contradicts science is likely to be true, still nothing that stops with science can be the whole truth.

Gordon Allport

#12. There is a story of an Oxford student who once remarked, "I despise all Americans, but have never met one I didn't like."

Gordon Allport