Quotes by Abraham H. Maslow

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What a man can be, he must be.
 
The child needs an organized world rather than an unorganized or unstructured one.
 
Injustice, unfairness, or inconsistency in the parents seems to make a child feel anxious and unsafe.
 
I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.
 
... we may say of the receptors, the effectors, of the intellect and the other capacities that they are primarily safety-seeking tools.
 
It is just the ones who have loved and been well loved, and who have had many deep friendships who can hold out against hatred, rejection or persecution.
 
Love and affection, as well as their possible expression in sexuality, are generally looked upon
with ambivalence and are customarily hedged about with many restrictions and inhibitions.
 
A want that is satisfied is no longer a want. The organism is dominated and its behavior organized only by unsatisfied needs. If hunger is satisfied, it becomes unimportant in the current dynamics of the individual.
 
.. [there are] people who, according to the best data available, have been starved for love in the earliest months of their lives and have simply lost forever the desire and the ability to give and to receive affection.
 
The neurosis in which the search for safety takes its clearest form is in the compulsive-obsessive neurosis. Compulsive- obsessives try frantically to order and stabilize the world so that no unmanageable, unexpected or unfamiliar dangers will ever appear.
 
Another peculiar characteristic of the human organism when it is dominated by a certain need is that the whole philosophy of the future tends also to change. For our chronically and extremely hungry man, Utopia can be defined very simply as a place where there is plenty of food.
 
..the average child in our society generally prefers a safe, orderly, predictable, organized world, which he can count on, and in which unexpected, unmanageable or other dangerous things do not happen, and in which, in any case, he has all-powerful parents who protect and shield him from harm.
 
...parental outbursts of rage or threats of punishment directed to the child, calling him names, speaking to him harshly, shaking him, handling him roughly, or actual physical punishment sometimes elicit such total panic and terror in the child that we must assume more is involved than the physical pain alone.
 
...love is not synonymous with sex. Sex may be studied as a purely physiological need. Ordinarily sexual behavior is multi-determined, that is to say, determined not only by sexual but also by other needs, chief among which are the love and affection needs. Also not to be overlooked is the fact that
the love needs involve both giving and receiving love.
 
Other broader aspects of the attempt to seek safety and stability in the world are seen in the very common preference for familiar rather than unfamiliar things, or for the known rather than the unknown. The tendency to have some religion or world-philosophy that organizes the universe and the men in it into some sort of satisfactorily coherent, meaningful whole is also in part motivated by safety-seeking. Here too we may list science and philosophy in general as partially motivated by the safety needs....
 
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