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I sincerely believe that we not only have the right to know what is good and what is evil we have the duty to acquire that knowledge if we hope to assume responsibility for our own lives and those of our children. Only by knowing the truth can we be set free.

Alice Miller

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Alice Miller
Age: 87 †
Born: 1923
Born: January 12
Died: 2010
Died: April 14
Painter
Psychologist
Sociologist
Writer
Piotrkow Trybunalski
Right
Responsibility
Children
Knowing
Believe
Knowledge
Good
Free
Sincerely
Evil
Assume
Hope
Acquire
Lives
Assuming
Truth
Duty

More quotes by Alice Miller

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If we do not work on all three levels -- body, feeling, mind -- the symptoms of our distress will keep returning, as the body goes on repeating the story stored in its cells until it is finally listened to and understood.
Alice Miller
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There are people who have benefited from therapy without being confronted with the past at all.
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The victimization of children is nowhere forbidden what is forbidden is to write about it.
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We can never do the right thing as long as we are out to please someone else.
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Parents are indeed capable of routinely torturing their children without anyone interceding.
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You gotta keep that in check - you got to.
Alice Miller
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We don't yet know, above all, what the world might be like if children were to grow up without being subjected to humiliation, if parents would respect them and take them seriously as people.
Alice Miller
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The results of any traumatic experience, such as abuse, can only be resolved by experiencing, articulating, and judging every facet of the original experience within a process of careful therapeutic disclosure.
Alice Miller
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If it's very painful for you to criticize your friends - you're safe in doing it. But if you take the slightest pleasure in it, that's the time to hold your tongue.
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Clinging uncritically to traditional ideas and beliefs often serves to obscure or deny real facts of our life history.
Alice Miller
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Sadism is not an infectious disease that strikes a person all of a sudden. It has a long prehistory in childhood and always originates in the desperate fantasies of a child who is searching for a way out of a hopeless situation.
Alice Miller
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The true opposite of depression is not gaiety or absence of pain, but vitality: the freedom to experience spontaneous feelings.
Alice Miller
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Disrespect is the weapon of the weak
Alice Miller
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Emotional access to the truth is the indispensable precondition of healing.
Alice Miller
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Today I should not be identified with any kind of regressive therapy.
Alice Miller
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One of the best ways of keeping your temper in an argument, as most of us know only too well, is not to listen to anything the other person has to say.
Alice Miller
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The truth about childhood, as many of us have had to endure it, is inconceivable, scandalous, painful. Not uncommonly, it is monstrous. Invariably, it is repressed. To be confronted with this truth all at once and to try to integrate it into our consciousness, however ardently we may wish it, is clearly impossible.
Alice Miller
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It is very difficult for people to believe the simple fact that every persecutor was once a victim. Yet it should be very obvious that someone who was allowed to feel free and strong from childhood does not have the need to humiliate another person.
Alice Miller
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The father receives his power from God (and from his own father). The teacher finds the soil already prepared for obedience, and the political leader has only to harvest what has been sown.
Alice Miller
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Child abuse is still sanctioned — indeed, held in high regard — in our society as long as it is defined as child-rearing. It is a tragic fact that parents beat their children in order to escape the emotions from how they were treated by their own parents.
Alice Miller