Karl A. Menninger Quotes

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

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

Unrest of spirit is a mark of life.

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.

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

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.

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

Neurotic means he is not as sensible as I am, and psychotic means he's even worse than my brother-in-law.

The adjuration to be "normal" seems shockingly repellent to me; I see neither hope nor comfort in sinking to that low level. I think it is ignorance that makes people think of abnormality only with horror and allows them to remain undismayed at the proximity of "normal" to average and mediocre. For surely anyone who achieves anything is, essentially, abnormal.

We want him to see that as a result of being parented by imperfect parents, he (she) chooses the wrong people for the right things, and chooses the right people for the wrong things. And most of all, they do not want to see it.

It is hard for a free fish to understand what is happening to a hooked one.

Any guy can love a thousand girls
But only a rare guy can love one girl
in a thousand ways

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.

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

Psychoanalysis has changed American psychology from a diagnostic to a therapeutic science, not because so many patients are cured by the psychoanalytic technique, but because of the new understanding of psychiatric patients it has given us, and the new and different concept of illness and health.

To "know thyself" must mean to know the malignancy of one's own instincts and to know, as well, one's power to deflect it.

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.

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.

Self love is not opposed to the love of other people. You cannot really love yourself and do yourself a favor without doing other people a favor, and vice versa.