Gabor Quotes & Sayings

A tone of voice or a look in another's eyes can activate powerful implicit memories. The person experiencing this type of memory may believe that he is just reacting to something in the present, remaining completely in the dark about what the rush of feelings that flood his mind and body really represents. Implicit memory is responsible for much of human behavior, its workings all the more influential because unconscious. — Gabor Mate

I've been married most of my life. And when you're married, you don't have sex. — Zsa Zsa Gabor

To a smart girl men are no problem - they're the answer. — Zsa Zsa Gabor

As children become increasingly less connected to adults, they rely more and more on each other; the whole natural order of things change. In the natural order of all mammalian cultures, animals or humans, the young stay under the wings of adults until they themselves reach adulthood. Immature creatures were never meant to bring one another to maturity. They were never meant to look to one another for primary nurturing, modelling, cue giving or mentoring. They are not equipped to give one another a sense of direction or values. As a result of today's shift to this peer orientation, we are seeing the increasing immaturity, alienation, violence and precocious sexualization of North American Youth. The disruption of family life, rapid economic and social changes to human culture and relationships, and the erosion of stable communities are at the core of this shift. — Gabor Mate

I'm a workaholic. Before long I'm traveling on my nervous energy alone. This is incredibly exhausting. — Eva Gabor

I should have been smart enough to stay happy. But my ambition ruled my life. — Eva Gabor

Diamonds are a girl's best friend and dogs are a man's best friend. Now you know which sex has more sense. — Zsa Zsa Gabor

Addictions always originate in pain, whether felt openly or hidden in the unconscious. They are emotional anesthetics. Heroin and cocaine, both powerful physical painkillers, also ease psychological discomfort. — Gabor Mate

There was no way I could live in Hollywood and not become an actress. — Eva Gabor

Dr. Jaak Panksepp told me. "If you don't recognize that the brain creates psychological responses, then neuroscience becomes a highly impoverished discipline. And that's where the battle is right now. Many neuroscientists believe that mental states are irrelevant for what the brain does. This is a Galileo-type battle, and it will not be won very easily because you have generations and generations of scholars, even in psychology, who have swallowed hook, line, and sinker the notion - the Skinnerian notion - that mentality is irrelevant in the control of behavior."3 Dr. — Gabor Mate

I feel like Zsa Zsa Gabor's sixth husband. I know what I'm supposed to do, but I don't know how to make it interesting. — Milton Berle

I made up my mind to be an actress when I was 4 years old. — Eva Gabor

I love the fast lane. — Eva Gabor

People behind the Iron curtain have such an incredible image of America and jazz. I expected to find a Gerry Mulligan or Miles Davis on every corner ... I almost expected a Shorty Rogers to deliver the milk, a Bud Shank to be the mailman. — Gabor Szabo

When I'm alone, I can sleep crossways in bed without an argument. — Zsa Zsa Gabor

Freedom in society is gauged by our success in getting what we want and conditioned by status and power, by race, class and gender. In the internal world of the psyche, however, freedom means something very different. It is the ability to opt for our long-term physical and spiritual well-being as opposed to our immediate urges. Absent that ability, any talk of 'free will' or 'choice' becomes nearly meaningless. — Gabor Mate

As a woman, you have to choose between your fanny or your face. I chose my face. — Zsa Zsa Gabor

The future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented. It was man's ability to invent which has made human society what it is. The mental processes of inventions are still mysterious. They are rational but not logical, that is to say, not deductive. — Dennis Gabor

Six years later the lead scientist, pharmacologist Kenneth Blum, published a much more subdued assessment: Unfortunately it was erroneously reported that [we] had found the "alcoholism gene," implying that there was a one-to-one relation between a gene and a specific behavior. Such misinterpretations are common - readers may recall accounts of an "obesity gene," or a "personality gene." Needless to say, there is no such thing as a specific gene for alcoholism, obesity, or a particular type of personality. ... Rather the issue at hand is to understand how certain genes and behavioral traits are connected. — Gabor Mate

To have twenty lovers in one year is easy. To have one lover for twenty years is difficult. — Zsa Zsa Gabor

Macho does not prove mucho. — Zsa Zsa Gabor

Adults envy the open-hearted and open-minded explorations of children; seeing their joy and curiosity, we pine for our own capacity for wide-eyed wonder. — Gabor Mate

If a man is truly in love, the most beautiful woman in the world couldn't take him away. Maybe for a few days, but not forever. — Eva Gabor

I've always known I would be a success, but I was surprised at the way it came. — Eva Gabor

I learned early that you only have so much energy to give. You have to spend it correctly. — Eva Gabor

East Hampton happens to have been the first place in the world where I was a star, a real star with a star pasted above my name on the dressing-room door. — Eva Gabor

All any girl needs, at any time in history, is simple velvet and basic diamonds. — Eva Gabor

The average housewife goes to the restaurant to relax and enjoy the food. But when Eva walks in, she becomes the center of attention. — Eva Gabor

Medical thinking usually sees stress as highly disturbing but isolated events such as, for example, sudden unemployment, a marriage breakup, or the death of a loved one. These major events are potent sources of stress for many, but there are chronic daily stresses in people's lives that are more insidious and more harmful in their long-term biological consequences. Internally generated stresses take their toll without in any way seeming out of the ordinary. — Gabor Mate

I don't take gifts from perfect strangers - but then, nobody is perfect. — Zsa Zsa Gabor

In the rare moments I permitted any stillness, I noted a small fluttering at the pit of my belly, a barely perceptible disturbance. The faint whisper of a word would sound in my head: writing. At first I could not say whether it was heartburn or inspiration. The more I listened, the louder the message became: I needed to write, to express myself through written language not only so that others might hear me but so that I could hear myself. The gods, we are taught, created humankind in their own image. Everyone has an urge to create. Its expression may flow through many channels: through writing, art, or music or through the inventiveness of work or in any number of ways unique to all of us, whether it be cooking, gardening, or the art of social discourse. The point is to honor the urge. To do so is healing for ourselves and for others; not to do so deadens our bodies and our spirits. When I did not write, I suffocated in silence. — Gabor Mate

What I call loaded, I'm not. What other people call loaded I am. — Zsa Zsa Gabor

As parents, we may as well accept that we will "lose it" at times. Perfect equanimity is beyond us. Temporary breaks in the relationship with the child are inevitable and are not in themselves harmful, unless they are frequent and catastrophic. The real harm is inflicted when the parent makes the child work at reestablishing contact, as in forcing a child to apologize before granting "forgiveness." There — Gabor Mate

It was not my class of people. There was not a producer, a press agent, a director, an actor. — Zsa Zsa Gabor

I believe in loyalty. When a woman reaches an age she likes, she should stick with it. — Eva Gabor

The most constructive solutions are those which take into consideration the views of all persons involved and are acceptable to all. Such outcomes are the result of negotiation strategies where the needs of both sides are considered important and an attempt is made to meet all needs. These solutions are appropriately called Win-Win because there are no losers. While often difficult to arrive at, the process leading to such solutions builds interpersonal relationships, increases motivation and improves commitment. Win-Win solutions are the most desirable outcomes of conflict resolution. — Gabor Peter

The family therapist David Freeman once concluded a public lecture on intimacy and relationships by saying that if there was any one thing he hoped his audience would remember from his talk, it was the awareness that one does not know his or her spouse, his or her children. We may believe we have a perfect idea of why they act as they do, when in reality our beliefs reflect no more than our own anxieties. — Gabor Mate

One of the words I railed against was "personality," as in a "TV personality." But now I wonder if it isn't the only word for that vast swarm of people who are famous for being famous - and possibly nothing else. What did the Gabor sisters actually do? — William Zinsser

I love to put on diamonds and beautiful evening gowns and make my girl-friends upset. — Zsa Zsa Gabor

It may be argued that, at least so far as work is concerned, what I call my addictions have benefited other people. Even if that were true, it still wouldn't explain or justify addiction. The contributions I have made in a number of areas that I am passionate about could have been achieved without the addictive zeal that often drove me. There is no such thing as a good addiction. Everything a person can do is better done if there is no addictive attachment that pollutes it. For every addiction - no matter how benign or even laudable it seems from the outside - someone pays a price. — Gabor Mate

I pay all my own bills ... I want to choose the man. I do not permit men to choose me. — Zsa Zsa Gabor

Having been engaged rather a lot of times, Zsa Zsa Gabor was asked whether a lady should give back the ring. Her answer?
Of course dahlink, but first, you take out all the diamonds. — Zsa Zsa Gabor

I was always a good housekeeper. Whenever I divorced I always kept the house. — Zsa Zsa Gabor

I do not know of anything in modern poetry as violently hostile to contemporary life as was the poetry of T. S. Eliot, which so perfectly fitted the mood of the young people between the two wars. I also find much more benevolence towards humanity in younger historians than there was in Spengler or in Toynbee. Still, it is not difficult to sense the disgust of the intellectuals at the new prosperous working class, 'with their eyes glued to the television screen,' who have become indifferent to radical ideas. — Dennis Gabor

In the Nazi Arbeit [work] camps back in '44 when a man was caught smoking one cigarette, the whole barracks would die," a patient, Ralph, once told me. "For one cigarette! Yet even so, the men did not give up their inspiration, their will to live and to enjoy what they got out of life from certain substances, like liquor or tobacco or whatever the case may be." I don't know how accurate his account was as history, but as a chronicler of his own drug urges and those of his fellow Hastings Street addicts, Ralph spoke the bare truth: people jeopardize their lives for the sake of making the moment livable. — Gabor Mate

The very essence of the opiate high was expressed by a twenty-seven-year-old sex-trade worker. She had HIV and has since died. "The first time I did heroin," she said to me, "it felt like a warm, soft hug." In that phrase she told her life story and summed up the psychological and chemical cravings of all substance-dependent addicts. — Gabor Mate

Olympics are coming to Vancouver in 2010 and with it the likelihood of gentrification in this neighborhood. The process has already begun. There's a fear that the politicians, eager to impress the world, will try to displace the addict population. — Gabor Mate

When in trouble, take a bath and wash your hair. — Zsa Zsa Gabor

Many studies link addiction to the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), a cortical segment found near the eye socket, or orbit.5 In drug addicts, whether they are intoxicated or not, it doesn't function normally. The OFC's relationship with addiction arises from its special role in human behavior and from its abundant supply of opioid and dopamine receptors. It is powerfully affected by drugs and powerfully reinforces the drug habit. It also plays an essential supporting role in nondrug addictions. Of course, it doesn't function (or malfunction) on its own but forms part of an extensive and incredibly complex, multifaceted network - nor is it the only cortical area implicated in addiction. — Gabor Mate

The United States contains less than 5 percent of the world's population but houses nearly a quarter of the world's prisoners. — Gabor Mate

Love is a game that two can play and both win. — Eva Gabor

A man in love is incomplete until he has married. Then he's finished. — Zsa Zsa Gabor

I only cook when I'm in love. — Zsa Zsa Gabor

Music gives me a sense of self-sufficiency and nourishment. I don't need anyone or anything. I bathe in it as in amniotic fluid; it surrounds and protects me. It's also stable, ever-available and something I can control - that is, I can reach for it whenever I want. I can also choose music that reflects my mood, or if I want, helps to soothe it ... music-seeking offers excitement and tension that I can immediately resolve and a reward I can immediately attain - unlike other tensions in my life and other desired rewards. Music is a source of beauty and meaning outside myself that I can claim as my own without exploring how, in my life, I keep from directly experiencing those qualities. Addiction, in this sense, is the lazy man's path to transcendence. — Gabor Mate

The addict's reliance on the drug to reawaken her dulled feelings is no adolescent caprice. The dullness is itself a consequence of an emotional malfunction not of her making; the internal shutdown of vulnerability. Vulnerability is our susceptibility to be wounded. This fragility is part of our nature and cannot be escaped. The best the brain can do is to shut down conscious awareness of it when pain becomes so vast or unbearable that it threatens our ability to function. The automatic repression of painful emotion is a helpful child's prime defence mechanism and can enable the child to endure trauma otherwise be catastrophic. The unfortunate consequence is a wholesale dulling of emotional awareness. — Gabor Mate

Transmission of documents via telephone wires is possible in principle, but the apparatus required is so expensive that it will never become a practical proposition. — Dennis Gabor

Our Darling Eva We Love You — Eva Gabor

The women's movement hasn't changed my sex life. It wouldn't dare. — Zsa Zsa Gabor

No society can understand itself without looking at its shadow side. — Gabor Mate

I'm acting when I serve as a hostess, when I run my wig business. I was born to act, and life itself is the greatest part. — Eva Gabor

Why does chronic self-administration of cocaine reduce the density of dopamine receptors? It's a simple matter of brain economics. The brain is accustomed to a certain level of dopamine activity. If it is flooded with artificially high dopamine levels, it seeks to restore the equilibrium by reducing the number of receptors where the dopamine can act. This mechanism helps to explain the phenomenon of tolerance, by which the user has to inject, ingest, or inhale higher and higher doses of a substance to get the same effect as before. — Gabor Mate

I've never met an ugly millionaire. They all look cute. No wonder I married 4 of them — Zsa Zsa Gabor

My husband said it was him or the cat. I miss him sometimes. — Zsa Zsa Gabor

If I had to design a system that was intended to keep people addicted, I'd design exactly the system that we have right now," Gabor would tell me. "I'd attack people, and ostracize them." He has seen that "the more you stress people, the more they're going to use. The more you de-stress people, the less they're going to use. So to create a system where you ostracize and marginalize and criminalize people, and force them to live in poverty with disease, you are basically guaranteeing they will stay at it." "If — Johann Hari

The research literature has identified three factors that universally lead to stress: uncertainty, the lack of information and the loss of control. — Gabor Mate

How many husbands have I had? You mean apart from my own? — Zsa Zsa Gabor

My co-workers expect me to be late and temperamental. — Eva Gabor

In the cloudy swirl of misleading ideas surrounding public discussion of addiction, there's one that stands out: the misconception that drug taking by itself will lead to addiction - in other words, that the cause of addiction resides in the power of the drug over the human brain. It is one of the bedrock fables sustaining the so-called War on Drugs. — Gabor Mate

What we call the personality is often a jumble of genuine traits and adopted coping styles that do not reflect our true self at all but the loss of it. — Gabor Mate

As a graduate of the Zsa Zsa Gabor School of Creative mathematics, I honestly do not know how old I am. — Erma Bombeck

I know nothing about sex, because I was always married. — Zsa Zsa Gabor

The difference between passion and addiction is that between a divine spark and a flame that incinerates. — Gabor Mate

When I'm reasonably balanced in my personal and spiritual life, I don't have difficulty finding compassion for my addicted patients. — Gabor Mate

Addiction is pretty simple. It's what happens when peolme don't get what they need, and end up soothing themselves. — Gabor Mate

My first husband, yes, I eloped with him from Hungary against my mother's wishes. — Eva Gabor

I call everyone 'Darling' because I can't remember their names. — Zsa Zsa Gabor

We may not be responsible for another's addiction or the life history that preceded it, but many painful situations could be avoided if we recognized that we are responsible for the way we ourselves enter into the interaction. And that, to put it most simply, means dealing with our own stuff. — Gabor Mate

The very same brain centers that interpret and feel physical pain also become activated during experiences of emotional rejection. In brain scans, they light up in response to social ostracism, just as they would when triggered by physically harmful stimuli. When people speak of feeling hurt or of having emotional pain, they are not being abstract or poetic, but scientifically quite precise. — Gabor Mate

The question is never "Why the addiction?" but "Why the pain?" The research literature is unequivocal: most hard-core substance abusers come from abusive homes. — Gabor Mate

The greatest damage done by neglect, trauma or emotional loss is not the immediate pain they inflict but the long-term distortions they induce in the way a developing child will continue to interpret the world and her situation in it. All too often these ill-conditioned implicit beliefs become self-fulfilling prophecies in our lives. We create meanings from our unconscious interpretation of early events, and then we forge our present experiences from the meaning we've created. Unwittingly, we write the story of our future from narratives based on the past ... Mindful awareness can bring into consciousness those hidden, past-based perspectives so that they no longer frame our worldview.'Choice begins the moment you disidentify from the mind and its conditioned patterns, the moment you become present ... Until you reach that point, you are unconscious.' ... In present awareness we are liberated from the past. — Gabor Mate

I had A Lover's Quarrel With The World Robert Lee Frost (Old Bennington Cemetery, Bennington, Vermont) Our Darling Eva We Love You. — Eva Gabor

I like a mannish man: a man who knows how to talk to and treat a woman - not just a man with muscles. — Zsa Zsa Gabor

The distressing internal state is not examined: the
focus is entirely on the outside: What can Ireceive from the world that
will make me feel okay, if only for a moment? Bare attention can show
her that these moods and feelings have only the meaning and power
that she gives them. Eventually she will realize that there is nothing to
run away from. Situations might need to be changed, but there is no
internal hell that one must escape by dulling or stimulating the mind. — Gabor Mate

I never hated any of my ex-fiances enough to return the rings. — Zsa Zsa Gabor

The only thing you have to know are your words. — Eva Gabor

The acronym COAL has been proposed for this attitude of compassionate curiosity: curiosity, openness, acceptance, and love: — Gabor Mate

Personally, I know nothing about sex, because I have always been married. — Zsa Zsa Gabor

Environmental cues associated with drug use - paraphernalia, people, places, and situations - are all powerful triggers for repeated use and for relapse, because they themselves trigger dopamine release. People trying to quit smoking, for example, are advised to avoid poker if they are used to having a cigarette while playing cards. Unless they move to a different area of town or to a recovery home, my Downtown Eastside patients find it virtually impossible to stop drug use, even when they form a strong intention to do so. Not only are drugs readily available, but everything and everyone in the environment reminds them of their habit. — Gabor Mate

The war mentality represents an unfortunate confluence of ignorance, fear, prejudice, and profit ... The ignorance exists in its own right and is further perpetuated by government propaganda. The fear is that of ordinary people scared by misinformation but also that of leaders who may know better but are intimidated by the political costs of speaking out on such a heavily moralized and charged issue. The prejudice is evident in the contradiction that some harmful substances (alcohol, tobacco) are legal while others, less harmful in some ways, are contraband. This has less to do with the innate danger of the drugs than with which populations are publicly identified with using the drugs. The white and wealthier the population, the more acceptable is the substance. And profit. If you have fear, prejudice, and ignorance, there will be profit. — Gabor Mate

Marriage is too interesting an experiment to be tried only once. — Eva Gabor

The War on Drugs, from the Hastings-facing window of the Portland
Hotel, is manifested in the pregnant Celia kneeling on the sidewalk,
handcuffed wrists behind her back, eyes cast on the ground. There
was no Detective-Sergeant Gillespie to protect her when, as a little
girl, she was raped by her stepfather and subjected to the nocturnal
spitting ritual, so in the War on Drugs she has become one of the
enemy. — Gabor Mate

I think I'm very old-fashioned. — Zsa Zsa Gabor

I always liked parties. You meet people; you can have fun. — Zsa Zsa Gabor

I believe in large families: every woman should have at least three husbands. — Zsa Zsa Gabor

It is impossible to understand addiction without asking what relief the addict finds, or hopes to find, in the drug or the addictive behaviour. — Gabor Mate

In the real world there is no nature vs. nurture argument, only an infinitely complex and moment-by-moment interaction between genetic and environmental effects — Gabor Mate

Not all addictions are rooted in abuse or trauma, but I do believe they can all be traced to painful experience. A hurt is at the centre of all addictive behaviours. It is present in the gambler, the Internet addict, the compulsive shopper and the workaholic. The wound may not be as deep and the ache not as excruciating, and it may even be entirely hidden - but it's there. As we'll see, the effects of early stress or adverse experiences directly shape both the psychology and the neurobiology of addiction in the brain. — Gabor Mate

A girl must marry for love, and keep on marrying until she finds it. — Zsa Zsa Gabor

There is nothing wrong with a woman welcoming all men's advances as long as they are in cash — Zsa Zsa Gabor

Not every story has a happy ending, ... but the discoveries of science, the teachings of the heart, and the revelations of the soul all assure us that no human being is ever beyond redemption. The possibility of renewal exists so long as life exists. How to support that possibility in others and in ourselves is the ultimate question. — Gabor Mate