"The 'experts' will not change the world-- they will simply make a satisfactory living helping people to adjust to it; the world will only change when ordinary people realize what is making them unhappy, and do something about it."

"The greatest misuse to which we put love, I believe, is to make it the conditional ground on which people can be rather than the unconditional ground from which they can do: we love people as objects rather than subjects."

"In order satisfactorily to function, we depend, throughout our lives, on the presence of others who will accord us validity, identity, and reality. You cannot be anything if you are not recognized as something; in this way your being becomes dependent on the regard of somebody else. You may be confirmed, or you may be disconfirmed, and if the latter is the case, often enough and pervasively enough, you simply cease to exist as a person."

"To stand for something, whether in child-rearing or any other sphere, is of course to risk error; it is also to become conspicuous under the gaze of the Other, to give away one's position and to invite rejection. But it is also the only way through which social evolution can take a truly moral direction; it is the inescapable consequence of recognizing and taking seriously the fact that it is we who make the world, not 'it' or 'them'."

"Most people simply deny what at another level they know to be the case, or suffer agonies of indecision over whether to trust their experience or not."

"Perhaps the anxious person's shame at his or her supposed 'difference' from others would be lessened by the realization that all of us, most of the time, do not know why we are doing what we are doing."

"Much of our waking life is spent in a desperate struggle to persuade others that we are not what we fear ourselves to be, or what they may discover us to be if they see through our pretenses. Most people, most of the time, have a profound and unhappy awareness of the contrast between what they are and what they ought to be."