Psychiatrists From The United States

"The science of human nature belongs to people who are not afraid to live independent lives. They alone have the flexible access to experience which can bring human wisdom and strength into being, and once these assets exist, they will send forth their influence with an authority that cannot be resisted, unmindful of artificial man made boundaries, reaching anywhere in the world."

"Man is the animal with a soul who thinks and builds; his penetrating insights into the laws of nature are there for any child to learn, and his impressive mastery of the materials of the earth stands ready to be imitated by anyone, but the home he has built for his own kind is still a lonely and impoverished place for many people. There is nothing about that loneliness that wisdom cannot change; there is nothing in that poverty that strength cannot overcome. Separated from each other, the thinker is a stranger in his own house, and the builder is a beggar at his own door. Together, they can bring the warmth of love and the helpfulness of power into the daily market place of living, taking a human position that is eternal and without compromise. In the midst of the obvious and the commonplace, and only in this birthplace of human contentment and happiness, the thinker and builder can leave the monastic cell and relinquish barracks mobility to claim the world in the name of human beings. When they do so, man can expect a human harvest equal to his dreams, and measured to the nobility of his posture."

"The Garden of Eden in which Adam and Eve dwelt was only an illusion. Before men accumulated sexual shame and celebrative guilt they lacked that character differentiation out of which the human soul takes its being. Their world was a garden only in the sense that the jungle is a garden to its animal inhabitants. Man means something different when he speaks of a garden, or an El Dorado, or a paradise for the human spirit. Man means a world of eternal springtime in the human heart, where faith never fails and hope never falters, where men always understand more today than they did yesterday, and establish an always broadening responsibility in the world. He means a world of lasting contentment, where the contentment of today passes that of yesterday, and a world of complete happiness where today's happiness is bigger than that of the day before. He means a world of love which fears nothing that the human eye can see, and a world of power which cannot be touched by rage in the performance of any act. When he sees these things he is not dreaming, and when he reaches for them he is not play acting. He is only sounding the battle horn and raising the banner by which he lays claim to ownership of the world, acting in his own name."

"Man lives in a paradoxical world where his human development is hamstrung by the fact that the only kind of free scientific inquiry he does not allow himself is the pursuit of human truth, and the only kind of audacity in engineering enterprise which is alien to his nature is the undertaking of moral intervention in the lives of others."

"The hostility of society toward homosexuality is only a special case of its general hostility toward the adolescent spirit. In order to undermine the creative efforts of individuals to shape their lives by their own standards of human understanding and morality, society identifies their deviancy in terms of its inadequacies and failures, thereby undermining their access to basic social acceptance in adaptive areas."

"Life is each human being's workshop. If a man survives a lifetime with his creative capacities intact, he has done his part to make a better world for all men."

"As long as psychotherapy concerns itself with the relief of psychic distress, avoiding the larger questions which arise from involvement with the creative process, it can perform its medical healing function without doing major violence to the social assets which creativity supplies."

"In psychotherapy, the impact of love feelings, technically called the transference, is held under some degree of control by the artificial device of interpreting the patient's feelings while establishing barriers to the psychological exposure of the therapist. The therapist is supposed to come to the relationship fully endowed with a stable set of established insights which will be adequate in a practical sense to any application which the patient's needs will require. The patient, on the other hand, is supposed to limit his interaction with the therapist to the areas where he is aware of psychic pain or where the therapist accepts communication in the name of therapeutic technique. If everything else is carefully excluded, neither participant will be called on to deal with areas of the unknown in themselves which would require creative personal investment."

"Islam has never been misunderstood. Islam is the problem. But no one is stating the truth. No one is taking a hard look at the root of terrorism which is the brain washing machine called Islam. Islam is not up to me, is not up to any Muslim – man or woman. Islam is exactly what the prophet Muhammad did and said. In order to understand Islam you have to read the biography of Muhammad. It is very traumatising. It is very shocking. He married his second wife when she was six years old. He was over fifty. [...] His third wife was Sophia. She was a Jewish woman. It was well documented, well written in our school books that he attacked her tribe. He killed her father, her brother, and her husband. At the same day, he slept with her. That's what I call Islam."

"Brother, you can believe in stones, as long as you don’t throw them at me. You are free to worship whoever you want, but other people’s beliefs are not your concern, whether they believe that the Messiah is God, son of Mary, or that Satan is God, son of Mary. Let people have their beliefs."

"Only the Muslims defend their beliefs by burning down churches, killing people and destroying embassies. This path will not yield any results. The Muslims must ask themselves what they can do for humankind, before they demand that humankind respect them."

"We have not seen a single Jew blow himself up in a German restaurant. We have not seen a single Jew destroy a church. We have not seen a single Jew protest by killing people."

""...I am a Muslim woman, yes I think myself as a Muslim, whether or not I believe in Islam. I did not choose to be a Muslim but it is not within my power to make myself anything else. Each one of us whoever she is persuaded to be in her early years. Each one of us has fallen into the trap set for him in childhood and rest of his life is no more than bitter struggle either to stay in that trap or leave it. Decision to stay or go is yours alone, and life challenges every one of us no matter what we do. If you decide to stay, life will present you with challenges which will drag you out of it, and if you decide to leave it will challenge you to remain. Staying is a challenge leaving is a challenge. One's freedom lies in your decision to stay or go."

"Please, please, don't let your civilized way of thinking interfere with your defending your great country. Please, please defend your values. Please defend your freedom. Defend the heaven you are living in. Don't take anything for granted. I don't. I enjoy every single moment of my American life. Just walking down the street by myself, without being accused of being a whore is a bless for me. Just chatting with my next door male neighbor, without being accused of committing adultry is a bless for me. Having a cup of coffee at Starbucks by myself is a bless for me. Please! Please, don't take anything for granted. Please defend this beautiful country! My dream is to see my country, Syria as free as America – not the other way around."

"The trouble with Islam is deeply rooted in its teachings. Islam is not only a religion. Islam (is) also a political ideology that preaches violence and applies its agenda by force."

"You need to understand that Islam is the problem. I am sick and tired of people here in the West asking me to soften my message. I am sick and tired of people asking me, "Are you trying to change 1.3 billion people?" Yes, I am trying!"

"I receive death threats on a daily basis. I'm a well-known writer in the Arab world. My writings expose me to millions of devout Muslims who have nothing positive to prove but the sheer cruelty of their teachings. Islam has deprived them of their intellectual ability to face criticism with an effective and acceptable way."

"The main source of psychopathic diseases is the fundamental instinct of fear with its manifestations, the feeling of anxiety, anguish, and worry."

"Human institutions depend for their existence and stability on the impulse of self-preservation and its close associate, — the fear instinct."

"It is time that the medical and teaching profession should realize that functional neurosis is not congenital, not inborn, not hereditary, but is the result of a defective, fear-inspiring education in early child life."

"The recognition, the diagnosis, and the preservation of psychopathic individuals account for the apparent increase of neurotics in civilized communities."

"The tendency of life is not the preservation of the species, but solely the preservation of each individual organism, as long as it is in existence at all, and is able to carry on its life processes."

"Self-preservation is the central aim of all life-activities."

"The freedom of the seemingly false opinion and our tolerance of it and our willingness to meet with it in the open help test the validity of truth while keeping alive the critical sense which is the main spring of all advancement of human thought and is the vital point, the very soul, of all human progress."

"If ceaseless vigilance is the price of liberty, more so is it true that ceaseless criticism of ever new opinions and ever new views, however distasteful, bizarre, and paradoxical, is the price of truth."

"A social aggregate which has chosen the fatal path of organic evolution must succumb to the same law of organic development to which all organisms are subject, namely greater and greater organization, increase of structure, greater differentiation, decrease of critical, personal, consciousness, loss of individual liberty, increased activity of the subconscious forces, falling into a state of somnambulism which can only be redeemed by revolution or by death."

"Greatness of individuality is inversely proportional to the mass of the social aggregate."

"If society is to progress on a truly humanistic basis, without being subject to mental epidemics and virulent social diseases to which the subconscious falls an easy victim, the personal consciousness of every individual should be cultivated to the highest degree possible."

"No opinion should be disdained and scorned."

"It is not the citizen, or a taxpayer, or voter, or office-holder, but the cultivated, free individual who is the true aim of all social progress."

"Superstitions, and especially the early cultivation of religion, with its “fear of the Lord” and of unknown mysterious agencies, are especially potent in the development of the instinct of fear. Even the early cultivation of morality and conscientiousness, with their fears of right and wrong, often causes psychoneurotic states in later life. Religious, social, and moral taboos and superstitions, associated with apprehension of threatening impending evil, based on the fear instinct, form the germs of psychopathic affections."

"Mental synthesis of psychic content in the unity of a moment-consciousness is a fundamental principle of psychology."

"Psychology must postulate uniformity of interrelation of physical, physiological, and psychic processes."

"The fact that psychology postulates an external material world and studies it in so far as it comes to be reflected in consciousness, points to another postulate which psychology must assume in addition, namely, the existence of an inner world consciousness."

"Not purpose but chance is at the heart of mental life."

"The man of genius whether as artist or thinker requires a mass of accidental variations to select from and a rigidly selective process of attention."

"The psycho-physiological hypothesis is both inductively and deductively the sine qua non of the science of psychology."

"Psychology is the science of psychic states both as to content and form, regarded from an objective standpoint, and brought in relation to the living corporeal individual."

"Science is the description of phenomena and the formulation of their relations."

"The general tendency of evolution is from structure to function, from bondage to freedom of the individual elements."

"The course of evolution is to a greater integration of similarly functioning ganglia."

"The principle of recognition of evil under all its guises is at the basis of the true education of man."

"Suggestibility varies as the amount of disaggregation, and inversely as the unification of consciousness."

"I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element in the classroom. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. As a teacher, I possess a tremendous power to make a child's life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or de-escalated, a child humanized or de-humanized."

"Teachers are expected to reach unattainable goals with inadequate tools. The miracle is that at times they accomplish this impossible task."

"Children are like wet cement. Whatever falls on them makes an impression."

"Treat a child as though he already is the person he's capable of becoming."

"[The neurotic] feels caught in a cellar with many doors, and whichever door he opens leads only into new darkness. And all the time he knows that others are walking outside in sunshine. I do not believe that one can understand any severe neurosis without recognizing the paralyzing hopelessness which it contains. … It may be difficult then to see that behind all the odd vanities, demands, hostilities, there is a human being who suffers, who feels forever excluded from all that makes life desirable, who knows that even if he gets what he wants he cannot enjoy it. When one recognizes the existence of all this hopelessness it should not be difficult to understand what appears to be an excessive aggressiveness or even meanness, unexplainable by the particular situation. A person so shut out from every possibility of happiness would have to be a veritable angel if he did not feel hatred toward a world he cannot belong to."

"Rationalization may be defined as self-deception by reasoning."

"It is amazing how obtuse otherwise intelligent patients can become when it is a matter of seeing the inevitability of cause and effect in psychic matters. I am thinking of rather self-evident connections such as these: if we want to achieve something, we must put in work; if we want to become independent, we must strive toward assuming responsibility for ourselves. Or: so long as we are arrogant, we will be vulnerable. Or: so long as we do not love ourselves, we cannot possibly believe that others love us, and must by necessity be suspicious toward any assertion of love. Patients presented with such sequences of cause and effect may start to argue, to become befogged or evasive."