Quotes About Psychology

People react primarily to direct experience and not to abstractions; it is very rare to find anyone who can become emotionally involved with an abstraction. The longer the bomb is around without anything happening, the better the job that people do in psychologically denying its existence. It has become as abstract as the fact that we are all going to die someday, which we usually do an excellent job of denying.

It's a complex relationship when your dad happened to be president and you are president and then you have all the amateur psychology that goes on when people try to speculate about motivations.

In a way, everybody is wounded from the wound of the real. This phenomenon is similar to madness. The mad person is wounded by his or her distorted relationship to the real.

I just love thinking about what makes people tick

Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces.

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.

Fervid atheism is usually a screen for repressed religion.

Religions survive mainly because they brainwash the young.

As a species we're fundamentally insane. Put more than two of us in a room, we pick sides and start dreaming up reasons to kill one another. Why do you think we invented politics and religion?

Religion is a defense against the experience of God.

I do not think that the real reason why people accept religion has anything to do with argumentation. They accept religion on emotional grounds.

I regard belief as a form of brain damage.

The religions of mankind must be classed among the mass-delusions of this kind. No one, needless to say, who shares a delusion ever recognizes it as such.

Religion (is) a universal obsessional neurosis.

True believers are continually shown by reality that their god doesn't exist, but have developed extensive coping mechanisms to deal with this cognitive dissonance.

All neurotics seek the religious

All people have religions. It's like we have religion receptors built into our brain cells, or something, and we'll latch onto anything that'll fill that niche for us.

Just as the chicken pox virus continues to live quietly in the body after the disease is gone, the god virus may live quietly in the host until something evokes it.

Religion may have been the original cure; Freud reminds us that it was also the original disease.

The effect of the consolations of religion may be compared to that of a narcotic.

Keep Darwinian thinking out of cosmology, out of psychology, out of human culture, out of ethics, politics, and religion!

People who practise a religion have been found to be happier, healthier and less stressed than those who don't.

Religion [is] the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity

In school, I studied psychology, linguistics, neuroscience. I understand that there is a real lack of respect for the brain.