I'm OK - You're OK Quotes
"Not a week goes by without some new "guru" or established figure releasing and promoting his or her latest "self-help" book."
"The impact of these two books on society in the 1960s cannot be underestimated."
"For Harris, being OK with yourself and with others is the way to happiness, personal satisfaction, and good relationships."
"The first two "self-help" books published: Games People Play in 1964 and I’m OK – You’re OK in 1969."
"The book reached number one on the New York Times Best Seller List for non-fiction works in 1972."
"Impatience has been expressed with increasing concern not only by patients and the general public but by psychiatrists as well."
"It is realistic in that it confronts the patient with the fact that he is responsible for what happens in the future no matter what has happened in the past."
"The purpose of this book is to define this tool. Anybody can use it. People do not have to be "sick" to benefit from it."
"The passion for truth is silenced by answers which have the weight of undisputed authority."
"This position, I’M NOT OK – YOU’RE OK, is the most deterministic decision of his life."
"Our earliest experiences, though ineffable, are recorded and do replay in the present."
"It is the loss of the freedom to change which marks the onset of the neurotic process."
"The kind of giving which is Adult is reflected upon by Erich Fromm: 'Giving is the highest expression of potency. In the very act of giving I experience my strength, my wealth, my power.'"
"The Adult, functioning as a probability estimator, can work out a system of values that encompasses not only the marriage relationship but all relationships."
"The most widespread misunderstanding is that which assumes that giving is 'giving up' something, being deprived of, sacrificing."
"The Adult can see more than a parental mandate in the idea 'it is more blessed to give than to receive.'"
"A strong Adult is built by learning to recognize your Child, its vulnerabilities, its fears, its principal methods of expressing these feelings."
"The task at hand is how to start a collection of recordings which play OK outcomes to transactions, successes in terms of correct probability estimating."
"The kind of giving which is Adult... fills me with joy. I experience myself as overflowing, spending, alive, hence as joyous."
"The only ways to eliminate prejudice are to uncover the fact that it is no longer dangerous to disagree with one’s parents and to update the Parent with data from today’s reality."
"We do not learn to be loving if we have never been loved."
"If the first five years of life consist totally of a critical struggle for physical and psychological survival, this struggle is likely to persist throughout life."
"The best way to help children is to help parents."
"Love is not a gazing at each other, but a looking outward together, in the same direction."
"The Adult can say 'no' to the Child’s clamoring for something bigger, better, and more in order to feel more OK."
"Love is a spendthrift, leaves its arithmetic at home, is always ‘in the red’…"
"A ship with no destination drifts and is carried along by the prevailing tides."
"Moral education is impossible apart from the habitual vision of greatness."
"The greatest difficulty in treating the manic-depressive personality is that very early the child gave up asking why."
"Sometimes these feelings become so depressive that there develops what is called a post-partum, or after-birth, psychosis."
"Mother cannot handle her own overwhelming needs and is totally incapable of caring for her baby."
"Knowing what she had been through before, she proceeded through her pregnancy with a great deal of apprehension."
"Eichhorn reports that if the doctor can use his Adult, it is easier for the husband to become a father."
"The Parent-Child relationship between some obstetricians and their patients essentially excludes the father."
"If the Child in the mother has a strong NOT OK position, and it is easily hooked by such life hitches, the way is open for a take-over by the Child in the parent."
"The child remains afloat by virtue of the mother’s OK."
"The value of a parental stroke for the child is exactly proportionate to the value the child sees in his parent."
"If you baby a baby when he’s a baby, you won’t have to baby him the rest of his life."
"Professional workers cannot give her the love she needs, but they can mobilize the members of her family, especially her husband, to do so."
"Any word that fails in communication is useless and should be discarded."
"Truth about how we are put together, in large measure, is what makes us free."
"In the final analysis it is what we know that makes a difference."
"Words that obscure the truth must be discarded for those that say it simply, accurately, and directly."
"Our goal in treatment is clearly stated with the new language just learned."
"The essential point is that diagnoses and symptoms lend themselves to the rather unfortunate human trait of gaming."
"Once a patient has learned the fundamentals of P-A-C, he can see the Transactional Analysis group as something much different."
"The primary benefit of treating people in groups with Transactional Analysis is that they move faster towards getting well."
"The treatment of individuals in groups can reduce treatment costs to the point where most wage earners can afford it."
"The danger, then, is the therapist’s not knowing or, for that matter, anyone’s not knowing what the I’M NOT OK position in the Child can do to a person’s own life."
"Essentially, Cook is saying in The Corrupted Land that American citizens have abandoned their personal morality for a collective, institutionalized morality."
"Stanley Milgram’s research at Yale begins to put a scientific foundation beneath Cook’s deductions."
"With numbing regularity good people were seen to knuckle under the demands of authority and perform actions that were callous and severe."
"They raise the possibility that human nature...cannot be counted on to insulate its citizens from brutality and inhumane treatment when at the direction of a malevolent authority."
"If we do not take into account nonviolent protest, we may expect increasing evidence of a take-over by the Child in rioting and violence."
"Democracy is the worst form of government one can imagine until one tries to imagine one that is better."
"Never did an educational institution less deserve the name of tyrant than the University of California."
"Their Parent is fragmented, their Child is depressed, and their Adult asks urgently, 'Isn’t there something more?'"
"It is the Child who commits murder. Where does the Child learn?"
"If we could read the secret history of our enemies we should find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility."
"We cannot be sympathetic with the NOT OK Child in our enemies because we are terrified of the games they play to deny the position."
"We share the dilemma of mistrust. Everywhere men want to negotiate but only on their own special terms."