Consistencies will be found in distinctive but stable patterns of if-then, situation-behavior relations that form contextualized, psychologically meaningful personality signatures.

Goal-directed self-imposed delay of gratification is perhaps the essence of emotional self-regulation, which becomes the difference between life success and personal failure.

The cool system enables future-oriented decisions; the hot system makes them difficult.

Willpower is a cognitive skill that can be taught, not a fixed trait you either have or do not have.

Behavior as we shall observe it always seems to have the character of getting-to or getting-from a specific goal-object, or goal-situation.

-- Edward C. Tolman

Language is not a cultural artifact that we learn the way we learn to tell time or how the federal government works. Instead, it is a distinct piece of the biological makeup of our brains. Language is a complex, specialized skill, which develops in the child spontaneously, without conscious effort or formal instruction, is deployed without awareness of its underlying logic, is qualitatively the same in every individual, and is distinct from more general abilities to process information or behave intelligently.

-- Steven Pinker

In the social jungle of human existence, there is no feeling of being alive without a sense of identity.

-- Erik Erikson

When an axon of cell A is near enough to excite cell B and repeatedly or persistently takes part in firing it, some growth process or metabolic change takes place in one or both cells such that A's efficiency, as one of the cells firing B, is increased.

-- Donald O. Hebb

The existence of dissonance, being psychologically uncomfortable, will motivate the person to try to reduce the dissonance and achieve consonance.

-- Leon Festinger

Social categorization can be considered as a process of bringing together social objects or events in groups which are equivalent with regard to an individual's actions, intentions and system of beliefs.

-- Henri Tajfel