People have motives and thoughts of which they are unaware.

Beginning in the 1960s, many studies showed that people who hold what we call irrational beliefs are significantly more disturbed than when they don't hold them, and the more strongly they hold them, the more disturbed they tend to be.

Freud had a gene for inefficiency, and I think I have a gene for efficiency. Had I not been a therapist, I would have been an efficiency expert.

People don't just get upset. They contribute to their upsetness.

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.

Freud had a gene for inefficiency, and I think I have a gene for efficiency.

I would have liked having children to some degree, but frankly I haven't got the time to take the kids to the goddamn ballgame.