By not caring too much about what people think, I'm able to think for myself and propagate ideas which are very often unpopular. And I succeed.

I started to call myself a "rational therapist" in January 1955; later I used the term "rational emotive." Now I call myself a "rational emotive behavior therapist." But from the start, I always included philosophic techniques as well as experiential, emotional and behavioral techniques.

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.

In fact most of what we call anxiety is overconcern about what someone thinks of you.

This, perhaps, goes to show that conditional self-esteem, as I have said for many years, is an insidious, real sickness, so much so that even Buddhists carelessly sneak it in and sometimes encourage their clients to achieve it.

When people change their irrational beliefs to undogmatic flexible preferences, they become less disturbed.

You have only to exist as you do and to live your life as best you can.