Karl Menninger quotes

Love cures people - both the ones who give it and the ones who receive it. (Karl Menninger)

Unrest of spirit is a mark of life.

Karl Menninger

The voice of the intelligence is soft and weak, said Freud. It 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 hissed away by hate, and extinguished by anger. Most of all it is silenced by ignorance.

Karl Menninger

One does not fall in love; one grows into love, and love grows in him.

Karl Menninger

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

Karl Menninger

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

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.

Karl Menninger

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

It is a strange and dismal thing that in a world of such need, such opportunity and such variety as ours, the search for an illusory peace of mind should go so zealously pursued and defended, while truth goes languishing.

Karl Menninger

What's done to children, they will do to society.

Karl Menninger

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. (Karl Menninger)

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

Karl Menninger

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

Karl Menninger