Latest Albert Ellis Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• We'd better work hard on getting rid of that must - Other people must do what I want them to do!" It's what makes people hostile, nasty, mean and combative, and it leads to feuds, wars and genocide. We'd better do something about that.

  Albert Ellis

  War, Hard Work, Mean

• People don't just get upset. They contribute to their upsetness. They always have the power to think, and to think about their thinking, and to think about thinking about their thinking, which the goddamn dolphin, as far as we know, can't do. Therefore they have much greater ability to change themselves than any other animal has.

  Albert Ellis

  Thinking, Animal, People

• There are three musts that hold us back: "I must do well. You must treat me well. And the world must be easy." And I sometimes think that as long as we keep the second must, which is socially learned, then some screwballs 100 years from now will manufacture atomic bombs in their bathtub and maybe annihilate the whole human race because they demand that the rest of the world must agree with their dogmas. When we don't agree, they may zap us.

  Albert Ellis

  Thinking, Years, Race

• I think the future of psychotherapy and psychology is in the school system. We need to teach every child how to rarely seriously disturb himself or herself and how to overcome disturbance when it occurs. In that sense, psychotherapy belongs in the schools.

  Albert Ellis

  Children, School, Thinking

• I would like to be remembered as one of the individuals who founded, ideologically and practically, cognitive behavior therapy and who pioneered multimodal or integrated therapy.

  Albert Ellis

  Behavior, Individual, Integrated

• By not caring too much about what people think, I'm able to think for myself and propagate ideas which are very often unpopular. And I succeed with them because, again, I don't care too much what other people think.

  Albert Ellis

  Caring, Thinking, Ideas

• I teach people to be flexible, scientific and logical in their thinking and therefore to be less prone to brainwashing by the therapist.

  Albert Ellis

  Thinking, People, Logical

• I'm one of the best-loved psychologists in the United States, but I'm also probably the most hated one.

  Albert Ellis

  United States, Psychologist, Hated

• As a matter of fact, as a result of my philosophy, I wasn't even upset about Hitler. I was willing to go to war to knock him off, but I didn't hate him. I hated what he was doing.

  Albert Ellis

  Hate, Philosophy, War

  "The Prince of Reason". Interview with Robert Epstein, www.psychologytoday.com. June 9, 2016.

• I'm very happy. I like my work and I like the various aspects of it - going around the world, teaching the gospel according to St. Albert - I like that. And seeing clients, doing group therapy, writing books.

  Albert Ellis

  Teaching, Book, Writing

• The Freudian tradition will never completely die because it has a few good points. For example, people have motives and thoughts of which they are unaware. Most of cognitive therapy has now adopted a similar idea. On the other hand, the relationship part of psychoanalysis - where you must have a deep, emotional relationship with the client - will, I think, get kicked in the teeth one of these days.

  Albert Ellis

  Emotional, Thinking, Ideas

• I would have liked having children to some degree, but frankly I haven't got the time to take the kids to the goddamn ballgame. So it would have had more disadvantages than advantages for them.

  Albert Ellis

  Children, Kids, Degrees

• We can't change the past, so we change how people are thinking, feeling and behaving today.

  Albert Ellis

  Past, Thinking, People

• Humans can always accept themselves unconditionally.

  Albert Ellis

  Accepting, Humans

• There's no evidence whatsoever that men are more rational than women or that men are more willing to surrender their irrational beliefs. Both sexes seem to be equally irrational.

  Albert Ellis

  Sex, Men, Belief

• When people change their irrational beliefs to undogmatic flexible preferences, they become less disturbed.

  Albert Ellis

  People, Belief, Preference

• Beginning in the 1960s, many studies showed that people who hold what we call irrational beliefs are significantly more disturbed than when they don't hold them, and the more strongly they hold them, the more disturbed they tend to be.

  Albert Ellis

  People, Belief, Study

• I started to call myself a "rational therapist" in January 1955; later I used the term "rational emotive." Now I call myself a "rational emotive behavior therapist." But from the start, I always included philosophic techniques as well as experiential, emotional and behavioral techniques.

  Albert Ellis

  Emotional, Technique, January

• My rational emotive behavior therapy (REBT) was one of the very few therapies that was originated partly or largely because I wanted to be brief and efficient. And therefore right from the start I was active and directive. I tried to show people some central masturbatory core to their philosophy and to get them to work at changing it cognitively, emotionally and behaviorally.

  Albert Ellis

  Philosophy, People, Behavior

• People are terrified of other people or difficult projects because they tell themselves that they could fail or be rejected. Failure can lead to sorrow, regret, frustration and annoyance - all healthy, negative feelings without which people couldn't exist. But then they add, "I absolutely must succeed and must be loved by significant persons, and if I don't, it's terrible and I'm no good." Those are irrational beliefs. As long as people keep them, they'll be terrified of life and will put themselves down when they get rejected.

  Albert Ellis

  Regret, Frustration, Long

  "The Prince of Reason". Interview with Robert Epstein, www.psychologytoday.com. January 1, 2001.

• When I started to get disillusioned with psychoanalysis I reread philosophy and was reminded of the constructivist notion that Epictetus had proposed 2,000 years ago: "People are disturbed not by events that happen to them, but by their view of them." I could see how that applied to many of my clients.

  Albert Ellis

  Philosophy, Years, Views

• Freudian therapists do a lot of listening and very little persuading, and that was one of the reasons I eventually gave up being an analyst. You had to be too passive and not speak up, and you couldn't give homework to clients. While I was still an analyst, I wrote several articles criticizing psychoanalysis, but the analysts weren't listening to my objections. So I finally quit psychoanalysis after practicing it for six years.

  Albert Ellis

  Years, Giving, Listening

• Freud had a gene for inefficiency, and I think I have a gene for efficiency. Had I not been a therapist, I would have been an efficiency expert.

  Albert Ellis

  Thinking, Experts, Efficiency

• I thought foolishly that Freudian psychoanalysis was deeper and more intensive than other, more directive forms of therapy, so I was trained in it and practiced it. Then I found that it intensively went into every irrelevancy under the sun - and that it didn't work. People got insights into what was bothering them, but they hardly did a damn thing to change.

  Albert Ellis

  People, Sun, Form

• I don't recommend that people speak their minds to their bosses or to somebody who's directly over them. You need to know when to speak your mind and what the penalty will be for doing so. Sometimes it's worth it, and often it's not!

  Albert Ellis

  Speak Your Mind, People, Boss

  Source: business.highbeam.com