Paul Watzlawick

This is the secret of propaganda: To totally saturate the person, whom the propaganda wants to lay hold of, with the ideas of the propaganda, without him even noticing that he is being saturated.

Paul Watzlawick

The suicide arrives at the conclusion that what he is seeking does not exist; the seeker concludes that what he has not yet looked in the right place.

Paul Watzlawick

The radical constructivist has relinquished 'metaphysical realism' once and for all and finds himself in full agreement with Piaget, who says, 'Intelligence organizes the world by organizing itself.

Paul Watzlawick

The materializations and actualizations of psychiatric diagnoses probably originate largely from this conviction.

Paul Watzlawick

The counterpart of the suicide is the seeker; but the difference between them is slight.

Paul Watzlawick

The belief that one's own view of reality is the only reality is the most dangerous of all delusions.

Paul Watzlawick

Suffice it to say that an essential part of the self-fulfilling effect of psychiatric diagnoses is based on our unshakable conviction that everything that has a name must therefore actually exist.

Paul Watzlawick

Radical constructivism, thus, is radical because it breaks with convention and develops a theory of knowledge in which knowledge does not reflect an 'objective' ontological reality.

Paul Watzlawick

Propaganda has of course a purpose, but this purpose must be disguised with such shrewdness and virtuosity that he who is supposed to be filled with this purpose never even knows what is happening.

Paul Watzlawick

It is difficult to imagine how any behavior in the presence of another person can avoid being a communication of one's own view of the nature of one's relationship with that person and how it can fail to influence that person.

Paul Watzlawick

In other words, what is supposedly found is an invention whose inventor is unaware of his act of invention, who considers it as something that exists independently of him; the invention then becomes the basis of his world view and actions.

Paul Watzlawick

Half a century ago the Viennese writer and critic Karl Kraus hinted at this possibility in his bitter aphorism according to which psychoanalysis is the illness who cure it considers itself to be.

Paul Watzlawick

Above all, in comedy, and again and again since classical times, passages can be found in which the level of representation is interrupted by references to the spectators or to the fictive nature of the play.

Paul Watzlawick

A self-fulfilling prophecy is an assumption or prediction that, purely as a result of having been made, cause the expected or predicted event to occur and thus confirms its own 'accuracy.'

Paul Watzlawick