Allport Quotes & Sayings

As partisans of our own way of life, we cannot help thinking in a partisan manner. — Gordon W. Allport

Life is too short so we must generalize. — Gordon Allport

What is familiar tends to become a value. — Gordon W. Allport

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

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

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

We cannot know the young child's personality by studying his systems of interest, for his attention is as yet too labile, his reactions impulsive, and interests unformed. From adolescence onward, however, the surest clue to personality is the hierarchy of interests, including the loves and loyalties of adult life. — Gordon W. Allport

Love received and love given comprise the best form of therapy. — Gordon W. Allport

Philosophically speaking, values are the termini of our intentions. We never fully achieve them. — Gordon W. Allport

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

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

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

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

Thwarted lives have the most character-conditioned hate — Gordon Allport

Self-love, it is obvious, remains always positive and active in our natures. — Gordon W. Allport

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 — Anonymous

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

Dogmatism makes for scientific anemia. — Gordon W. Allport

If there is a purpose in life at all, there must be a purpose in suffering and in dying. But no man can tell another what this purpose is. Each must find out for himself, and must accept the responsibility that his answer prescribes. If he succeeds he will continue to grow in spite of all indignities. — Gordon Allport

People who are aware of, and ashamed of, their prejudices are well on the road to eliminating them. — Gordon Allport

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

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

If a person is capable of rectifying his erroneous judgments in the light of new evidence he is not prejudiced. Prejudgments become prejudices only if they are reversible when exposed to new knowledge. A prejudice, unlike a simple misconception, is actively resistant to all evidence that would unseat it. We tend to grow emotional when a prejudice is threatened with contradiction. Thus the difference between ordinary prejudgments and prejudice is that one can discuss and rectify a prejudgment without emotional resistance. — Gordon Allport

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

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

Given a thimbleful of [dramatic] facts we rush to make generalizations as large as a tub. — Gordon W. Allport

Prejudgments become prejudices only if they are not reversible when exposed to new knowledge. — Gordon Allport

The specific goals we set for ourselves are almost always subsidiary to our long range intentions. A good parent, a good neighbour, a good citizen, is not good because his specific goals are acceptable, but because his successive goals are ordered to a dependable and socially desirable set of values. (1947) — Gordon Allport

So many tangles in life are ultimately hopeless that we have no appropriate sword other than laughter. — Gordon W. Allport

...obscurantist feature in social scientists trying to combine pluralism with environmentalism. They are so preoccupied with the role of prejudice in creating hostile environments that they perpetually deny the obvious, that stereotypes are rough generalizations about groups derived from long-term observation. Such generalizations are usually correct in describing group tendencies and in predicting certain collective actions, even if they do not adequately account for differences among individuals. Nonetheless, as Goldberg explains, the self-described pluralist and prominent psychologist Gordon Allport went out of his way in The Nature of Prejudice (1954) to reject stereotypes as factually inaccurate as well as socially harmful. For Allport and a great many other social Scientists, nothing is intuitively correct unless it is politically so. — Paul Edward Gottfried

No corner of the world is free from group scorn. — Gordon W. Allport

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

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

Each person is an idiom unto himself, an apparent violation of the syntax of the species. — Gordon W. Allport

The mature religious sentiment is ordinarily fashioned in the workshop of doubt. — Gordon Allport

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

A prejudice, unlike a simple misconception, is actively resistant to all evidence that would unseat it. — Gordon W. Allport

Personality is and does something ... It is what lies behind specific acts and within the individual — Gordon Allport

The surest way to lose truth is to pretend that one already wholly possesses it. — Gordon W. Allport

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

The dog [in Pavlov's experiments] does not continue to salivate whenever it hears a bell unless sometimes at least an edible offering accompanies the bell. But there are innumerable instances in human life where a single association, never reinforced, results in the establishment of a life-long dynamic system. An experience associated only once with a bereavement, an accident, or a battle, may become the center of a permanent phobia or complex, not in the least dependent on a recurrence of the original shock. — Gordon Allport

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

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