Quotes from Karl A. Menninger

The voice of the intelligence is drowned out by the roar of fear. It is ignored by the voice of desire. It is contradicted by the voice of shame. It is biased by hate and extinguished by anger. Most of all it is silenced by ignorance.

Is it hard for the reader to believe that suicides are sometimes committed to forestall the committing of murder? There is no doubt of it. Nor is there any doubt that murder is sometimes committed to avert suicide.

Mental health problems do not affect three or four out of every five persons, but one out of one.

Set up as an ideal the facing of reality as honestly and as cheerfully as possible.

Police are not all bad guys. Nobody is all bad guys.

Once asked what action he would recommend if a person were to feel a nervous breakdown coming on: Lock up your house, go across the railroad tracks, and find someone in need and do something for him.

Hope is an adventure, a going forward, a confident search for a rewarding life.

Hope is a necessity for normal life and the major weapon against the suicide impulse.

What the teacher is, is more important than what he teaches.

We need criminals to identify ourselves with, to secretly envy and to stoutly punish. They do for us the forbidden, illegal things we wish to do.

Our lives are shaped by those who love us as well as those who refuse to love us.

The friends who listen to us are the ones we move toward, and we want to sit in their radius.

Hope is a necessity for normal life and the major weapon against the suicide impulse.

Unrest of spirit is a mark of life.

The voice of the intelligence is drowned out by the roar of fear. It is ignored by the voice of desire. It is contradicted by the voice of shame. It is biased by hate and extinguished by anger. Most of all it is silenced by ignorance.

One of the most untruthful things possible, you know, is a collection of facts, because they can be made to appear so many different ways.

Unrest of spirit is a mark of life.

Attitudes are much more important than facts.

It was his optimism that Freud bequeathed to America and it was the optimism of our youthfulness, our freedom from the sterner, sadder tradition of Europe which enabled us to seize his gift.