psychology

People ask you for criticism, but they only want praise.

My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened.

What we really want is for things to remain the same but get better.

The final delusion is the belief that one has lost all delusions.

Ray prided himself on his snap judgments. He could look at a person and in ten minutes know who they were, and never need to reconsider his opinion. The men he evaluated he tended to place in one of three bins in his mind: “good guy,” “naive guy,” and “crook.” Sam very obviously was not a good guy.

Patients derive a certain satisfaction from their sufferings.

When you treat people like idiots, they’ll behave like idiots.

I think Teach worries his readers would use an anti-corporate message as a defense: “Yeah, I never accomplish anything, but that’s the fault of those evil corporations who caused me to have the wrong psychic structure. This famous psychiatrist says so! Wanna go to a protest with me instead of trying personal growth? All the experts agree that we’re excused from changing our defective characters in any way until capitalism is overthrown!”

We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.