"I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. I possess tremendous power to make 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 is escalated or de-escalated, and a person is humanized or de-humanized. If we treat people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat people as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming."
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Original Language: English
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Widely attributed to Goethe, but also claimed to be a distortion of a passage by Haim Ginott.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Johann_Wolfgang_von_Goethe
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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
1749 – 1832
deutscher Dichter
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