Kindliness seems to exist primarily as an animal instinct, so deeply rooted that mental degeneracy, which works from the top down,does not destroy it until the mind sinks to the lower grades of idiocy. — Charles Horton Cooley Copy Share Image
We have no higher life that is really apart from other people. It is by imagining them that our personality is built up; to be without the power of imagining them is to be a low-grade idiot. — Charles Horton Cooley Copy Share Image
So far as discipline is concerned, freedom means not its absence but the use of higher and more rational forms as contrasted with those… — Charles Horton Cooley Copy Share Image
To retire to the monastery, or the woods, or the sea, is to escape from the sharp suggestions that spur on ambition. — Charles Horton Cooley Copy Share Image
Each man must have his I; it is more necessary to him than bread; and if he does not find scope for it within… — Charles Horton Cooley Copy Share Image
I is a militant social tendency, working to hold and enlarge its place in the general current of tendencies. So far as it can… — Charles Horton Cooley Copy Share Image
“I am not what I think I am, and I am not what you think I am. I am what I think you think… — Charles Horton Cooley Copy Share Image
One should never criticize his own work except in a fresh and hopeful mood. The self-criticism of a tired mind is suicide. — Charles Horton Cooley Copy Share Image
It happens from time to time in every complex and active society, that certain persons feel the complexity and insistence as a tangle, and… — Charles Horton Cooley Copy Share Image
Since freedom is not a fixed thing that can be grasped and held once for all, but a growth, any particular society, such as… — Charles Horton Cooley Copy Share Image
If we divine a discrepancy between a man's words and his character, the whole impression of him becomes broken and painful; he revolts the… — Charles Horton Cooley Copy Share Image
To get away from one's working environment is, in a sense, to get away from one's self; and this is often the chief advantage… — Charles Horton Cooley Copy Share Image
In the days of witchcraft it used to be believed that if one person secretly made a waxen image of another and stuck pins… — Charles Horton Cooley Copy Share Image
To persuade is more trouble than to dominate, and the powerful seldom take this trouble if they can avoid it. — Charles Horton Cooley Copy Share Image
