35 Quotes by Carol Tavris

Most people, when directly confronted by evidence that they are wrong, do not change their point of view or course of action but justify it even more tenaciously. Even irrefutable evidence is rarely enough to pierce the mental armor of self-justification.

Rebels and dissidents challenge the complacent belief in a just world, and they are usually denigrated for their efforts.

During McCarthyism, teachers feared for their jobs if they belonged to a left-wing group. Today teachers fear for their jobs if they hug a crying child. As in all moral panics, an accusation is enough to destroy a person’s life. Hysteria trumps evidence.

I see no reason why I should be consciously wrong today because I was unconsciously wrong yesterday. – Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, 1948.

The second-sweetest set of three words in English is ‘I don’t know.’

Baseball lasts as long as it takes. Like life, like love, baseball exists in real time.

No one seems to have learned, or can remember, the magic words that calm people when they are frightened or threatened: “I’m sorry; I didn’t see you; are you all right?” The inability to speak these words, I observe, goes right along with a propensity for mindless insults.

The history of the women’s movement in America follows a consciousness-amnesia cycle.

Many books in popular psychology are a melange of the author’s comments, a dollop of research, and stupefyingly dull transcriptions from interviews.