Willard Gaylin Quotes

• A man may not always be what he appears to be, but what he appears to be is always a significant part of what he is.

  Willard Gaylin

  Men, May, Significant

  Willard Gaylin (1970). “In the service of their country: war resisters in prison”

  46 Copy quote

• I not only think that we will tamper with Mother Nature, I think Mother wants us to.

  Willard Gaylin

  Mother, Thinking, Want

  "Gattaca", www.imdb.com. 1997.

  22 Copy quote

• Life is to be enjoyed, not simply endured. Pleasure and goodness and joy support the pursuit of survival.

  Willard Gaylin

  Support, Joy, Survival

  16 Copy quote

• Spare me therefore, your good intentions, your inner sensitivities, your unarticulated and unexpressed love. And spare me also these tedious psycho-historians which, by exposing the goodness inside the bad man, and the evil in the good-invariably establish a vulgar and perverse egalitarianism, as if the arrangement of what is outside and what inside makes no moral difference.

  Willard Gaylin

  Men, Egalitarianism, Differences

  15 Copy quote

• In a world where survival is always seen as a struggle, and in which some pitfalls always exist, if something brings into question our confidence in our own coping ability, it will threaten our safety.

  Willard Gaylin

  Struggle, Safety, Survival

  10 Copy quote

• Shame and guilt are noble emotions essential in the maintenance of civilized society, and vital for the development of some of the most refined and elegant qualities of human potential.

  Willard Gaylin

  Quality, Guilt, Essentials

  8 Copy quote

• Feeling good and feeling bad are not necessarily opposites. Both at least involve feelings. Any feeling is a reminder of life. The worst 'feeling' evidently is non-feeling.

  Willard Gaylin

  Opposites, Feel Good, Feelings

  18 Copy quote

• The larger office, the corner space, the extra window are the teddy bears and tricycles of adult office life

  Willard Gaylin

  Inspiration, Space, Office

  Willard Gaylin (1989). “The Rage Within: Anger in Modern Life”, Penguin Books

  10 Copy quote

• All of us inevitably spend our lives evolving from an initial to a final stage of dependence. If we are fortunate enough to achieve power and relative independence along the way, it is a transient and passing glory.

  Willard Gaylin

  Independence, Finals, Libertarian

  4 Copy quote

• We must live in groups; other people are like nutrients for us, and are absolutely essential for our survival.

  Willard Gaylin

  People, Survival, Groups

  6 Copy quote

• Our imagination and reasoning powers facilitate anxiety; the anxious feeling is precipitated not by an absolute impending threat-such as the worry about an examination, a speech, travel-but rather by the symbolic and often unconscious representations.

  Willard Gaylin

  Worry, Imagination, Anxiety

  8 Copy quote

• Jealousy, which serves the struggle for survival, can deteriorate into the envy which draws defeat even from victory.

  Willard Gaylin

  Jealousy, Struggle, Envy

  Willard Gaylin (1992). “The male ego”, Viking Pr

  5 Copy quote

• A street thug and a paid killer are professionals - beasts of prey, if you will, who have dissociated themselves from the rest of humanity and can now see human beings in the same way that trout fishermen see trout.

  Willard Gaylin

  Thug, Humanity, Trout

  Willard Gaylin (1982). “The Killing of Bonnie Garland: A Question of Justice”, Simon & Schuster

  20 Copy quote

• We are what we seem to be.

  Willard Gaylin

  Character, Human Nature, Seems

  4 Copy quote

• To probe for unconscious determinants of behavior and then define a man in their terms exclusively, ignoring his overt behavior altogether, is a greater distortion than ignoring the unconscious completely.

  Willard Gaylin

  Men, Behavior, Distortion

  7 Copy quote

• Feelings are the fine instruments which shape decision-making in an animal cursed and blessed with intelligence, and the freedom which is its corollary. They are signals directing us toward goodness, safety, pleasure, and group survival.

  Willard Gaylin

  Blessed, Animal, Safety

  Willard Gaylin (1992). “The male ego”, Viking Pr

  5 Copy quote

• When men achieve the fruits of their material success, they often become aware of an emptiness--an incompleteness--in their lives;the hollowness of having, but not raising, children, of not making true commitments to them. Which, sadly, does not mean that they weren't capable of it.

  Willard Gaylin

  Children, Mean, Commitment

  4 Copy quote

• Because we are intelligent creatures-meaning that we are freed from instinctive and patterned behavior to a degree unparalleled in the animal kingdom-we are capable of, and dependent on, using rational choice to decide our futures.

  Willard Gaylin

  Animal, Intelligent, Choices

  4 Copy quote

• We occupy a space of our own creation-a collage compounded by bits and pieces of actuality arranged into a design determined by our internal perceptions, our hopes, our fears, our memories, and our anticipations.

  Willard Gaylin

  Memories, Space, Design

  4 Copy quote

• English is such a deliciously complex and undisciplined language, we can bend, fuse, distort words to all our purposes. We give old words new meanings, and we borrow new words from any language that intrudes into our intellectual environment.

  Willard Gaylin

  Giving, Intellectual, Purpose

  10 Copy quote

• Man, the most complicated of the animals, has a relatively short gestation period. Beyond that, he will be born, unlike most mammals, in a ridiculously helpless state.

  Willard Gaylin

  Animal, Men, Gestation Period

  4 Copy quote

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