Erik Erikson Quotations

Men have always shown a dim knowledge of their better potentialities by paying homage to those purest leaders who taught the simplest and most inclusive rules for an undivided mankind.

The only thing that can save us as a species is seeing how we're not thinking about future generations in the way we live.

We cannot leave history entirely to nonclinical observers and to professional historians.

The way you 'take history' is also a way of 'making history.'

A man's conflicts represent what he 'really' is.

Man's true taproots are nourished in the sequence of generations, and he loses his taproots in disrupted developmental time, not in abandoned localities.

The psychoanalytic method is essentially a historical method.

He who is ashamed would like to force the world not to look at him, not to notice his exposure. He would like to destroy the eyes of the world.

Every adult, whether he is a follower or a leader, a member of a mass or of an elite, was once a child. He was once small. A sense of smallness forms a substratum in his mind, ineradicably. His triumphs will be measured against this smallness; his defeats will substantiate it.

You can actively flee, then, and you can actively stay put.