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M. Scott Peck

92 quotes

“Mental health is an ongoing process of dedication to reality at all costs.”
M. Scott Peck (1936–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Life is a series of problems. Do we want to moan about them or solve them? Do we want to teach our children to solve them?”
M. Scott Peck (1936–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Although the act of nurturing another's spiritual growth has the effect of nurturing one's own, a major characteristic of genuine love is that the distinction between oneself and the other is always maintained and preserved.”
M. Scott Peck (1936–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Laymen tend to associate sadism and masochism with purely sexual activity, thinking of them as the sexual enjoyment derived from inflicting or receiving physical pain. Actually, true sexual sadomasochism is a relatively uncommon form of psychopathology. Much, much more common, and ultimately more serious, is the phenomenon of social sadomasochism, in which people unconsciously desire to hurt and be hurt by each other through their nonsexual interpersonal relations.”
M. Scott Peck (1936–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Most people who seek psychotherapy are suffering from a sense of personal inadequacy. Yet there are always a few whose problem is just the opposite: they suffer because they cannot accept their greatness. Perhaps ten percent of my patients have had to come to terms not with their inferiority but with their superiority. To accept one's legitimate talents without guilt or fear is as much a responsibility as to accept one's faults.”
M. Scott Peck (1936–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is through the pain of confronting and resolving problems that we learn.”
M. Scott Peck (1936–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There are a number of different theological models of evil ... This book will concern itself solely with the subject of human evil, and its primary focus will be on 'bad people'.”
M. Scott Peck (1936–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Dangerous though a psychology of evil might be, it will be more dangerous not to have one.”
M. Scott Peck (1936–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It would, I believe, be quite appropriate to classify evil people as constituting a specific variant of the narcisstic personality disorder.”
M. Scott Peck (1936–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This is a dangerous book.”
M. Scott Peck (1936–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Who in the hell is Satan? I don't know.”
M. Scott Peck (1936–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The spirit of evil is one of unreality, but it itself is real. To think otherwise is to be misled.”
M. Scott Peck (1936–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If we attempt te deal with (human) evil by destroying it, we will also end up destroying ourselves, spiritually if not physcially. And we are likely to take some innocent people with us as well.”
M. Scott Peck (1936–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Evil can be thought of as the exercise of political power — that is, the imposition of one’s will upon others by overt or covert coercion in order to avoid extending oneself for the purpose of nurturing spiritual growth.”
M. Scott Peck (1936–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Among the reasons that the Oedipus complex is so important in psychiatry is that adults who have failed to resolve it usually have great difficulty in accomplishing many of the renunciations required for successful adult adjustments. They still have not learned that they cannot have their cake and eat it too.”
M. Scott Peck (1936–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have come to suspect that many cases of schizophrenia may in fact be the result of evil being passed from parents to children ... it is possible that some children, faced with the choice of either becoming evil themselves or utterly losing their minds, choose the latter. Evil is contagious. The children of the evil are often damaged for life.”
M. Scott Peck (1936–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My favorite definition of evil is that it is militant ignorance.”
M. Scott Peck (1936–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Evil is that force ... residing either inside or outside of human beings, that seeks to kill life or liveliness.”
M. Scott Peck (1936–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is not the weak or the stupid who are most likely to be the targets of evil, but the strong and the good. Evil seeks to destroy the life force wherever it is most manifest.”
M. Scott Peck (1936–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It has often seemed to me that those who are most dedicated to the light are the ones most subject to assault by the forces of darkness. Evil always hates the light. And yet these attacks are not necessarily destructive. In the long run they may serve the purposes of grace. For through them the servants of the light may become more firmly committed to their cause, their dedication tested and refined.”
M. Scott Peck (1936–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“While Eastern religions have a far more developed understanding of spiritual growth, they have paid comparatively little attention to the phenomenon of human evil.”
M. Scott Peck (1936–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Lying is both a cause and a manifestation of evil.”
M. Scott Peck (1936–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Compartmentalization is not the root of all evil; it is, however, the principal psychological mechanism of evil. Deprive an evil man of his capacity to compartmentalize, and he will be like a general without an army. Or better yet, he will undergo a conversion to goodness — a conversion to integrity.”
M. Scott Peck (1936–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Whenever the roles of individuals within a group become specialized, it becomes both possible and easy for the individual to pass the moral buck to some other part of the group. In this way, not only does the individual forsake his conscience but the conscience of the group as a whole can become so fragmented and diluted as to be nonexistent.”
M. Scott Peck (1936–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Satan has no power except in a human body.”
M. Scott Peck (1936–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The only power that Satan has is through human belief in its lies.”
M. Scott Peck (1936–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The reality of the matter is that the naming of evil is still in a primitive stage.”
M. Scott Peck (1936–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I know no more accurate epithet for Satan than the Father of Lies.”
M. Scott Peck (1936–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“... As (Malachi) Martin points out, it is terribly important to understand that Satan is a spirit. I have said I have met Satan, and this is true. But it is not tangible in the way that matter is tangible. It no more has horns, hooves, and a forked tail than God has a long white beard. Even the name, Satan, is just a name we have given to something basically nameless... It is spirit.”
M. Scott Peck (1936–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The only real route to peace is through self-purification. We must purge ourselves of our own pride, our need to control, and our unwillingness to suffer for the sake of others. Peacemaking begins inside each of us.”
M. Scott Peck (1936–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The problem of evil is perhaps the most fundamental of all human problems. True community is always in a state of almost constant terror at the problem of human evil.”
M. Scott Peck (1936–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In any case, in Vietnam it was the extraordinary power of nationalism, not communism, that brought the United States to its knees. To oppose legitimate nationalism is to do so at our peril.”
M. Scott Peck (1936–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You may remember that The Road Less Travelled opened with the sentence "Life is difficult." And to that great truth, I will now add another translation: Life is complex.”
M. Scott Peck (1936–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It occurred to him (Carl Jung) that it was perhaps no accident that we traditionally referred to alcoholic drinks as ‘spirits’, and that perhaps alcoholics were people who had a greater thirst for the spirit than others, and that perhaps alcoholism was a spiritual disorder or, better yet, a spiritual condition.”
M. Scott Peck (1936–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is important to realize that cults are a dime a dozen and that a great many businesses are cults.”
M. Scott Peck (1936–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There are also, I believe, good addictions of a sort, and I have been blessed (or cursed) by one of them: an addiction to consciousness.”
M. Scott Peck (1936–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But one of the best definitions for evil is that it is 'militant ignorance'. Militant unconsciousness. The Vietnam War is one of the best examples I know of this militant ignorance on a grand scale.”
M. Scott Peck (1936–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Page 10, UK 2010 edition.
“It is human to be shy.”
M. Scott Peck (1936–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I see no value whatsover in unconstructive suffering.”
M. Scott Peck (1936–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have had the opportunity to meet a great number of wonderful, deep-thinking people, and I have never met such a person who was not basically shy. A few of them had not thought of themselves as shy, but as we talked about it, they came to realize that they were. And the very few people I have met who were not the least bit shy were people who had been seriously damaged in some way, who had lost some of their humanity.”
M. Scott Peck (1936–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One of the major dilemmas we face both as individuals and as a society is simplistic thinking — or the failure to think at all. It is not just a problem, it is the problem.”
M. Scott Peck (1936–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If all the energy required to think seems troublesome, the lack of thinking causes far more trouble and conflict for ourselves as individuals and for the society in which we live.”
M. Scott Peck (1936–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“From my practice as a psychiatrist and my experience and observations in general, I have become familiar with the common errors related to the failure to think well. One, of course, is simply not thinking. Another is making assumptions in thinking, through the use of one-dimensional logic, stereotypes, and labelling. Another problem is the belief that thinking and communication don’t require much effort. Another is assuming that thinking is a waste of time, which is a particular factor in the quiet rage we experience around the failure to solve many social problems.”
M. Scott Peck (1936–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“... For the most part, we tend to label for the wrong reasons. When we use labelling to make assumptions and unjustly discriminate against others - or to make excuses for ourselves - we infer broader qualities about a person or a situation without the information necessary to support our conclusions. Sometimes, the consequences can be destructive not only to others but to ourselves.”
M. Scott Peck (1936–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I believe that all psychological disorders are bascially disorders of consciousness. They are not rooted in the unconscious but in a conscious mind that refuses to think and is unwilling to deal with certain issues, bear certain feelings, or tolerate pain. These issues, feelings , or desires are in the unconscious only because a pain-avoiding conscious mind has thrust them there.”
M. Scott Peck (1936–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“... Thinking and consciousness are inextricably locked together in a parallel relationship. Consciousness is the foundation of all thinking, and thinking is the foundation of all consciousness. Anytime there is a failure in thinking, there is a corresponding deficit in a person’s level of consciousness. Thus, all human behavior—the good, the bad, and the indifferent—is determined by the extent, or lack thereof, of the quality of thinking and consciousness involved.”
M. Scott Peck (1936–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Radical thinkers are also independent thinkers.”
M. Scott Peck (1936–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Again and again all of the great religions tell us that the path away from narcissism is the path toward meaning in life.”
M. Scott Peck (1936–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I believe that the differences between those who are actively religious or spiritual and those who are not are generally not so much random as developmental.”
M. Scott Peck (1936–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I want to scream this from the rooftops: ‘All symptoms are overdetermined.’ Except that I want to expand it way beyond psychiatry. I want to expand it to almost everything. I want to translate it, ‘Anything of any significance is overdetermined. Everything worth thinking about has more than one cause.’ Repeat after me: ‘For any single thing of importance, there are multiple reasons.’ … Because we assume there is a reason for everything, we go looking for it when we should be looking for them.”
M. Scott Peck (1936–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source