Gordon W. Allport Quotations

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.

What is familiar tends to become a value.

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.

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?

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.

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.

The surest way to lose truth is to pretend that one already wholly possesses it.

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

Each person is an idiom unto himself, an apparent violation of the syntax of the species.

To a considerable degree, all minority groups suffer from the same state of marginality with its haunting consequences of insecurity, conflict, and irritation.