Best 29 quotes of Carol Tavris on MyQuotes

Carol Tavris

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    Carol Tavris

    A fan without a team is like a hog without truffles - she has nothing to root for.

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    Carol Tavris

    As in all moral panics, an accusation is enough to destroy a person's life. Hysteria trumps evidence.

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    Carol Tavris

    Baseball lasts as long as it takes. Like life, like love, baseball exists in real time.

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    Carol Tavris

    Depression is not 'anger turned inward'; if anything, anger is depression turned outward. Follow the trail of anger inward, and there you will find the small, still voice of pain.

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    Carol Tavris

    Doubt is not the enemy of justice; overconfidence is.

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    Carol Tavris

    During McCarthyism, teachers feared for their jobs if they belonged to a left-wing group. Today teachers fear for their jobs if they hug a crying child. As in all moral panics, an accusation is enough to destroy a person's life. Hysteria trumps evidence.

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    Carol Tavris

    Even irrefutable evidence is rarely enough to pierce the mental armor of self-justification.

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    Carol Tavris

    For some of the large indignities of life, the best remedy is direct action. For the small indignities, the best remedy is a Charlie Chaplin movie. The hard part is knowing the difference.

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    Carol Tavris

    History is written by the victors, but it's victims who write the memoirs.

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    Carol Tavris

    In sports as in child rearing, marital arguments, or tantrums, the same laws of learning apply; when an emotion is encouraged and the rules permit it, it is perpetuated, not 'drained.' ... An emotion without social rules of containment and expression is like an egg without a shell: a gooey mess.

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    Carol Tavris

    In the horrifying calculus of self-deception, the greater the pain we inflict on others, the greater the need to justify it to maintain our feelings of decency and self-worth.

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    Carol Tavris

    Many books in popular psychology are a melange of the author's comments, a dollop of research, and stupefyingly dull transcriptions from interviews.

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    Carol Tavris

    Most people, when directly confronted by evidence that they are wrong, do not change their point of view or course of action but justify it even more tenaciously. Even irrefutable evidence is rarely enough to pierce the mental armor of self-justification.

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    Carol Tavris

    No one seems to have learned, or can remember, the magic words that calm people when they are frightened or threatened: "I'm sorry; I didn't see you; are you all right?" The inability to speak these words, I observe, goes right along with a propensity for mindless insults.

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    Carol Tavris

    Of course, if you photograph the behavior of women and men at a particular time in history, in a particular situation, you will capture differences. But the error lies in inferring that a snapshot is a lasting picture. What women and men do at a moment in time tells us nothing about what women and men are in some unvarying sense - or about what they can be.

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    Carol Tavris

    Rebels and dissidents challenge the complacent belief in a just world, and, as the theory would predict, they are usually denigrated for their efforts. While they are alive, they may be called 'cantankerous,' 'crazy,' 'hysterical,' 'uppity,' or 'duped.' Dead, some of them become saints and heroes, the sterling characters of history. It's a matter of proportion. One angry rebel is crazy, three is a conspiracy, 50 is a movement.

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    Carol Tavris

    Rebels and dissidents challenge the complacent belief in a just world, and they are usually denigrated for their efforts.

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    Carol Tavris

    Science is a form of arrogance control.

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    Carol Tavris

    [Sexual] fantasies, like children, are most interesting to the people who have them.

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    Carol Tavris

    The difference between the Japanese and the American is summed up in their opposite reactions to the proverb (popular in both nations), "A rolling stone gathers no moss." Epidemiologist S. Leonard Syme observes that to the Japanese, moss is exquisite and valued; a stone is enhanced by moss; hence a person who keeps moving and changing never acquires the beauty and benefits of stability. To Americans, the proverb is an admonition to keep rolling, to keep from being covered with clinging attachments.

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    Carol Tavris

    The history of the women's movement in America follows a consciousness-amnesia cycle.

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    Carol Tavris

    The individualism of American life, to our glory and despair, creates anger and encourages its release; for when everything is possible, limitations are irksome. When the desires of the self come first, the needs of others are annoying. When we think we deserve it all, reaping only a portion can enrage.

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    Carol Tavris

    The scientific method is designed to help investigators overcome the most entrenched human cognitive habit: the confirmation bias, the tendency to notice and remember evidence that confirms our beliefs or decisions, and to ignore, dismiss, or forget evidence that is discrepant. That's why we are all inclined to stick to a hypothesis we believe in. Science is one way of forcing us, kicking and screaming if necessary, to modify our views.

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    Carol Tavris

    The second-sweetest set of three words in English is 'I don't know.'

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    Carol Tavris

    When anger is not trampling roughshod through our nervous system, it is sitting sullenly in some unspecified internal organ. "She's got a lot of anger in her," people will say (it nestles, presumably, somewhere in the gut), or, "He's a deeply angry man" (as opposed, presumably, to a superficially angry one). If anger isn't released, it "turns inward" and metamorphoses into another creature altogether.

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    Carol Tavris

    When it comes to food, there are two large categories of eaters, those who do not worry about what they eat but should, and those who do worry about what they eat but should not.

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    Carol Tavris

    By far, the most important distortions and confabulations of memory are those that serve to justify and explain our own lives. The mind, sense-making organ that it is, does not interpret our experiences as if they were shattered shards of glass; it assembles them into a mosaic. From the distance of years, we see the mosaic’s pattern. It seems tangible, unchangeable; we can’t imagine how we could reconfigure those pieces into another design. But it is a result of years of telling our story, shaping it into a life narrative that is complete with heroes and villians, an account of how we came to be the way we are. Because that narrative is the way we understand the world and our place in it, it is bigger than the sum of its parts. If on part, one memory, is shown to be wrong, people have to reduce the resulting dissonance and even rethink the basic mental category: you mean Dad (Mom) wasn’t such a bad (good) person after all? You mean Dad (Mom) was a complex human being? The life narrative may be fundamentally true; Your father or mother might really have been hateful, or saintly. The problem is that when the narrative becomes a major source of self-justification, one the storyteller relies on to excuse mistakes and failings, memory becomes warped in its service. The storyteller remembers only the confirming examples of the parent’s malevolence and forgets the dissonant instances of the parent’s good qualities. Over time, as the story hardens, it becomes more difficult to see the whole parent — the mixture of good and bad, strengths and flaws, good intentions and unfortunate blunders. Memories create our stories, but our stories also create our memories.

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    Carol Tavris

    Lyndon Johnson was a master of self-justification. According to his biographer Robert Caro, when Johnson came to believe in something, he would believe in it “totally, with absolute conviction, regardless of previous beliefs, or of the facts in the matter.” George Reedy, one of Johnson’s aides, said that he “had a remarkable capacity to convince himself that he held the principles he should hold at any given time, and there was something charming about the air of injured innocence with which he would treat anyone who brought forth evidence that he had held other views in the past. It was not an act… He had a fantastic capacity to persuade himself that the ‘truth’ which was convenient for the present was the truth and anything that conflicted with it was the prevarication of enemies. He literally willed what was in his mind to become reality.” Although Johnson’s supporters found this to be a rather charming aspect of the man’s character, it might well have been one of the major reasons that Johnson could not extricate the country from the quagmire of Vietnam. A president who justifies his actions only to the public might be induced to change them. A president who has justified his actions to himself, believing that he has the truth, becomes impervious to self-correction.

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    Carol Tavris

    To show how memory changes to fit our story, psychologists study how memories evolve over time: if your memories of the same people change, becoming positive or negative spending on what is happening in your life now, then it’s all about you, not them. This process happens so gradually that it can be a jolt to realize you ever felt differently.