I get people to truly accept themselves unconditionally, whether or not their therapist or anyone loves them.

I would like to be remembered as one of the individuals who founded, ideologically and practically, cognitive behavior therapy and who pioneered multimodal or integrated therapy.

Most people would have given up when faced with all the criticism I've received over the years.

We teach people that they upset themselves. We can't change the past, so we change how people are thinking, feeling and behaving today.

Eating is always a decision, nobody forces your hand to pick up food and put it into your mouth.

People don't just get upset. They contribute to their upsetness. They always have the power to think, and to think about their thinking, and to think about thinking about their thinking, which the goddamn dolphin, as far as we know, can't do. Therefore they have much greater ability to change themselves than any other animal has, and I hope that REBT teaches them how to do it.

The individual is taught that there is nothing that he as a total person is to feel ashamed of or self-hating for.