Babies control and bring up their families as much as they are controlled by them; in fact ... the family brings up baby by being brought up by him.

The richest and fullest lives attempt to achieve an inner balance between three realms: work, love and play.

Personality, too, is destiny.

When established identities become outworn or unfinished ones threaten to remain incomplete, special crises compel men to wage holy wars, by the cruelest means, against those who seem to question or threaten their unsafe ideological bases.

The sense of identity provides the ability to experience one's self as something that has continuity and sameness, and to act accordingly.

If one sees the personality not as an apparatus that is essentially constructed by the time childhood is over, but as always in its essence developing, then life at 25 or 30 or at the gateway to middle age will stimulate its own intrigue, surprise, and exhilaration of discovery.

Adolescents need freedom to choose, but not so much freedom that they cannot, in fact, make a choice.