Gordon W. Allport Quotes

#1. Mature striving is linked to long-range goals. Thus, the process of becoming is largely a matter of organizing transitory impulses into a pattern of striving and interest in which the element of self-awareness plays a large part.

Gordon W. Allport

#2. Dogmatism makes for scientific anemia.

Gordon W. Allport

#3. To understand what a person is, it is necessary always to refer to what he may be in the future, for every state of the person is pointed in the direction of future possibilities.

Gordon W. Allport

#4. Love received and love given comprise the best form of therapy.

Gordon W. Allport

#5. Philosophically speaking, values are the termini of our intentions. We never fully achieve them.

Gordon W. Allport

#6. Open-mindedness is considered to be a virtue. But, strictly speaking, it cannot occur. A new experience must be redacted into old categories. We cannot handle each event freshly in its own right. If we did so, of what use would past experience be?

Gordon W. Allport

#7. As partisans of our own way of life, we cannot help thinking in a partisan manner.

Gordon W. Allport

#8. Personality is less a finished product than a transitive process. While it has some stable features, it is at the same time continually undergoing change.

Gordon W. Allport

#9. It is not that we have class prejudice, but only that we find comfort and ease in our own class. And normally there are plenty of people of our own class, or race, or religion to play, live, and eat with, and to marry.

Gordon W. Allport

#10. The outlines of the needed psychology of becoming can be discovered by looking within ourselves; for it is knowledge of our own uniqueness that supplies the first, and probably the best, hints for acquiring orderly knowledge of others.

Gordon W. Allport

#11. A prejudice, unlike a simple misconception, is actively resistant to all evidence that would unseat it.

Gordon W. Allport

#12. The primary problem in the psychology of becoming is to account for the transformation by which the unsocialized infant becomes an adult with structured loves, hates, loyalties, and interests, capable of taking his place in a complexly ordered society.

Gordon W. Allport

#13. Scarcely anyone ever wants to be anybody else. However handicapped or unhappy he feels himself, he would not change places with other more fortunate mortals.

Gordon W. Allport

#14. So many tangles in life are ultimately hopeless that we have no appropriate sword other than laughter.

Gordon W. Allport

#15. To a considerable degree, all minority groups suffer from the same state of marginality with its haunting consequences of insecurity, conflict, and irritation.

Gordon W. Allport

#16. No corner of the world is free from group scorn.

Gordon W. Allport

#17. It takes a major unhappiness, a prolonged and bitter experience, to drive us away from loyalties once formed. And sometimes no amount of punishment can make us repudiate our loyalty.

Gordon W. Allport

#18. People it seems, are busy leading their lives into the future, whereas psychology, for the most part, is busy tracing them into the past.

Gordon W. Allport

#19. The answer to growing complexity in the social sphere is renewed efforts at participation by each one of us, or else a progressive decline of inert and unquestioning masses submitting to government by an elite which will have little regard for the ultimate interest of the common man.

Gordon W. Allport

#20. What is familiar tends to become a value.

Gordon W. Allport

#21. Given a thimbleful of [dramatic] facts we rush to make generalizations as large as a tub.

Gordon W. Allport

#22. The surest way to lose truth is to pretend that one already wholly possesses it.

Gordon W. Allport

#23. Each person is an idiom unto himself, an apparent violation of the syntax of the species.

Gordon W. Allport

#24. Self-love, it is obvious, remains always positive and active in our natures.

Gordon W. Allport