The basic ingredients of psychotherapy are religion, rhetoric, and repression, which are themselves mutually overlapping categories.

Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily.

Mental illness is a myth, whose function is to disguise and thus render more palatable the bitter pill of moral conflicts in human relations.

All drugs of any interest to any moderately intelligent person in America are now illegal.

Clear thinking requires courage rather than intelligence.

In the animal kingdom, the rule is, eat or be eaten; in the human kingdom, define or be defined.

Individual psychotherapy - that is, engaging a distressed fellow human in a disciplined conversation and human relationship - requires that the therapist have the proper temperament and philosophy of life for such work. By that I mean that the therapist must be patient, modest, and a perceptive listener, rather than a talker and advice-giver.