Hope is the major weapon against the suicide impulse.
—Karl Menninger
Topics: Hope, Aspirations
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.
—Karl Menninger
Topics: Facts
Clinical experience has indicated that where a child has been exposed early in his live to episodes of physical violence, whether he himself is the victim or … the witness, he will often later demonstrate similar outbursts of uncontrollable rage and violence of his own. Aggression becomes an easy outlet through which the child’s frustrations and tensions flow, not just because of a simple matter of learning that can be just as simply unlearned, not just because he is imitating a bad behavior model and can be taught to imitate something more constructive, but because these traumatic experiences have overwhelmed him. His own emotional development is too immature to withstand the crippling inner effects of outer violence. Something happens to the child’s character, to his sense of reality, to the development of his controls against impulses that may not later be changed easily but which may lead to reactions that in turn provoke more reactions – one or more of which may be criminal. Then society reacts against him for what he did, but more for what all of us have done – unpleasantly – to one another. Upon him is laid the iniquity of us all…
—Karl Menninger
Topics: Parenting
One does not fall in love; one grows into love, and love grows in him.
—Karl Menninger
Topics: Love
Unrest of the spirit is a mark of life; one problem after another presents itself and in the solving of them we can find our greatest pleasure.
—Karl Menninger
Topics: Problems
What the teacher is, is more important than what he teaches.
—Karl Menninger
Topics: Teachers
Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. The friends who listen to us are the ones we move toward. When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand.
—Karl Menninger
People repeat in adult life emotions they experience in childhood. Many of the people whom I spent the last 30 or 40 years treating at so much per minute wouldn’t have needed any treatment at all if they had had the right care as children.
—Karl Menninger
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.
—Karl Menninger
Topics: Optimism
The voice of 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.
—Karl Menninger
What is done to children, they will do to society.
—Karl Menninger
Topics: Children
Unrest of spirit is a mark of life.
—Karl Menninger
Love is a medicine for the sickness of the world; a prescription often given, too rarely taken.
—Karl Menninger
Topics: Love
Before we can diminish our sufferings from the ill-controlled aggressive assaults of fellow citizens, we must renounce the philosophy of punishment, the obsolete, vengeful penal attitude. In its place we would seek a comprehensive, constructive social attitude – therapeutic in some instances, restraining in some instances, but preventive in its total social impact.
In the last analysis this becomes a question of personal morals and values. No matter how glorified or how piously disguised, vengeance as a human motive must be personally repudiated by each and every one of us. This is the message of old religions and new psychiatries. Unless this message is heard, unless we … can give up our delicious satisfactions in opportunities for vengeful retaliation on scapegoats, we cannot expect to preserve our peace, our public safety, or our mental health.
…But the punitive attitude persists. And just so long as the spirit of vengeance has the slightest vestige of respectability, so long as it pervades the public mind and infuses its evil upon the statute books of the law, we will make no headway toward the control of crime. We cannot assess the most appropriate and effective penalties so long as we seek to inflict retaliatory pain.
—Karl Menninger
Topics: Prison
Love cures people—both the ones who give it and the ones who receive it.
—Karl Menninger
Topics: Love, People, Give
Fears are educated into us, and can, if we wish, be educated out.
—Karl Menninger
Topics: Fear, Anxiety
Attitudes are more important than facts.
—Karl Menninger
Topics: Attitude
Hope is an adventure, a going forward—a confident search for a rewarding life.
—Karl Menninger
Topics: Hope
It is doubtless true that religion has been the world’s psychiatrist throughout the centuries.
—Karl Menninger
Topics: Religion
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.
—Karl Menninger
Topics: Self-Esteem, Acceptance, Realization, Self Respect, Awareness
Generous people are rarely mentally ill people.
—Karl Menninger
Topics: Purpose
Mental health problems do not affect three or four out of every five persons, but one out of one.
—Karl Menninger
Topics: Health
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- David Viscott American Psychiatrist
- M. Scott Peck American Psychiatrist
- William Glasser American Psychiatrist
- Thomas Szasz Hungarian Psychiatrist
- Theodore Isaac Rubin American Psychiatrist, Author
- R. D. Laing British Psychiatrist
- Charles Krauthammer American Political Columnist
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. American Physician, Essayist
- Michael Crichton American Novelist
- William James American Philosopher
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