Quotes by Karl A. Menninger

Hope is a necessity for normal life and the major weapon against the suicide impulse.
– Karl A. Menninger
Is it hard for the reader to believe that suicides are sometimes committed to forestall the committing of murder? There is no doubt of it. Nor is there any doubt that murder is sometimes committed to avert suicide.
– Karl A. Menninger
It was his optimism that Freud bequeathed to America and it was the optimism of our youthfulness, our freedom from the sterner, sadder tradition of Europe which enabled us to seize his gift.
– Karl A. Menninger
Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. The friends who listen to us are the ones we move toward. When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand.
– Karl A. Menninger
Love cures people - both the ones who give it and the ones who receive it.
– Karl A. Menninger
Money-giving is a very good criterion of a person's mental health. Generous people are rarely mentally ill people.
– Karl A. Menninger
One does not fall in love; one grows into love, and love grows in him.
– Karl A. Menninger
One of the most untruthful things possible, you know, is a collection of facts, because they can be made to appear so many different ways.
– Karl A. Menninger
Police are not all bad guys. Nobody is all bad guys.
– Karl A. Menninger
Psychoanalysis has changed American psychiatry from a diagnostic to a therapeutic science, not because so many patients are cured by the psychoanalytic technique, but because of the new understanding of psychiatric patients it has given us and the new and different concepts of illness and health.
– Karl A. Menninger
Self-love is not opposed to the love of other people. You cannot really love yourself and do yourself a favor without doing people a favor, and vise versa.
– Karl A. Menninger
The voice of the intelligence is drowned out by the roar of fear. It is ignored by the voice of desire. It is contradicted by the voice of shame. It is biased by hate and extinguished by anger. Most of all it is silenced by ignorance.
– Karl A. Menninger
To know thyself must mean to know the malignancy of one's own instincts and to know, as well, one's power to deflect it.
– Karl A. Menninger
Unrest of spirit is a mark of life.
– Karl A. Menninger
We need criminals to identify ourselves with, to secretly envy and to stoutly punish. They do for us the forbidden, illegal things we wish to do.
– Karl A. Menninger
What's done to children, they will do to society.
– Karl A. Menninger
Set up as an ideal the facing of reality as honestly and as cheerfully as possible.
– Karl A. Menninger