Top 37 Allport Quotes
#1. Allport suggested that self-esteem can often be a goal in itself: "most people want to be higher on the status ladder than they are" (p. 371). However, self-enhancement can be based in avoidance as well as approach motives. Insecurity
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#2. Personality is and does something ... It is what lies behind specific acts and within the individual
Gordon Allport
#3. The mature religious sentiment is ordinarily fashioned in the workshop of doubt.
Gordon Allport
#4. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. Many studies have discovered a close link between prejudice and "patriotism" ... Extreme bigots are almost always super-patriots.
Gordon Allport
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. People who are aware of, and ashamed of, their prejudices are well on the road to eliminating them.
Gordon Allport
#13. 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
#15. Given a thimbleful of [dramatic] facts we rush to make generalizations as large as a tub.
Gordon W. Allport
#16. The surest way to lose truth is to pretend that one already wholly possesses it.
Gordon W. Allport
#17. Each person is an idiom unto himself, an apparent violation of the syntax of the species.
Gordon W. Allport
#18. 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
#19. Self-love, it is obvious, remains always positive and active in our natures.
Gordon W. Allport
#20. As partisans of our own way of life, we cannot help thinking in a partisan manner.
Gordon W. Allport
#21. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. Love received and love given comprise the best form of therapy.
Gordon W. Allport
#26. Philosophically speaking, values are the termini of our intentions. We never fully achieve them.
Gordon W. Allport
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. So many tangles in life are ultimately hopeless that we have no appropriate sword other than laughter.
Gordon W. Allport
#30. Thwarted lives have the most character-conditioned hate
Gordon Allport
#31. Prejudgments become prejudices only if they are not reversible when exposed to new knowledge.
Gordon Allport
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#36. A prejudice, unlike a simple misconception, is actively resistant to all evidence that would unseat it.
Gordon W. Allport
#37. 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
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