People have motives and thoughts of which they are unaware.

If you would stop, really stop, damning yourself, others, and unkind conditions, you would find it almost impossible to upset yourself emotionally - about anything. Yes, anything.

Unless, of course, you insist on identifying yourself with the people and things you love; and thereby seriously disturb yourself.

Religious fanaticism has clearly produced, and in all probability will continue to produce, enormous amounts of bickering, fighting, violence, bloodshed, homicide, feuds, wars, and genocide.

I wrote several articles criticizing psychoanalysis, but the analysts weren't listening to my objections. So I finally quit after practicing it for six years.

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.