Phil McGraw Quotes

I think people get intimidated, and they think results should happen right away. Like I said earlier, the body can only change so fast, and so when you're doing it right you just have to keep at it and keep up with a balanced program.

It isn't enough to think outside the box. Thinking is passive. Get used to acting outside the box.

We spend too much time as people thinking about what we don't have instead of actually making a change, and we just need to make that change now because we're being giving the opportunity.

I love radio! I think radio, done right, can have more influence and have a greater connection with people and be more deeply meaningful than another medium like TV, which is on all the time and you're paying attention to it half the time.

I don't want to jump off the roof or jump for joy depending on my movie reviews, or whether it makes money. I think the larger, more meaningful things are family and the people you love.

Most people do not ever pick up the phone. They never ask, and that is what separates the people that do things from the people that just dream about them. You have to act, and you have to be willing to fail. You have to be willing to crash and burn, because if you are afraid of failing, you will not get very far.

If you are clear where you are going and you take several steps in that direction every day, you eventually have to get there. If I head north out of Santa Barbara and take five steps a day, eventually I have to end up in San Francisco. So decide what you want, write it down, review it constantly, and each day do something that moves you toward those goals.

Successful people move on their own initiative but they know where they are going before they start.

I've never really understood the desire to be immortal myself. The idea of both wanting to live forever in some form and wanting to stay young forever just sounds exhausting. It's one of those desires that people think they want but when you actually stop to think about what it actually means, it's really awful. One of the reasons that life is bearable is because it's going to end soon. One of the main concerns of fiction is how do we make a life of 85 years or so meaningful.

I think what the American people want more than anything else is a strong and decisive leader.

I've made tough calls and tough times and been held accountability. I think that is the kind of leadership that the American people need now to produce results.

I think that literary forms are losing their capacity to connect people to issues, to the experiences that feel most meaningful to them.

Think before you act and then act decisively. Fortune favors the brave.

Take massive action. So many people wait until they have all the answers.

At certain crucial moments - an emergency or an opportunity - one must act first and think later.

I think it is difficult to achieve a meaningful political coalition if you have race-based programs that divide members of the coalition. The problem I have, however, is that white people assume an either/or position: Either we have race-based programs or we don't. What I see is comprehensive social reform that includes race-based and race-neutral programs.

I think psychotherapy saves lives and is hugely meaningful and I think that one of the unfortunate aspects of prescription drugs working well is that people tend to think that's enough.

I think that not criticizing my successor is a statement unto itself, in terms of trying to create an environment where people are able to have a meaningful discussion or debate without trash talk.

I often think that those people are the happiest who know nothing at all of the world, and sitting in the little empire of the fireside, where there is no contention or cabal, think we are in a golden age of existance.

People must learn how to think well to achieve their dreams and to reach their potential.

If there were no controls on the internet - and I shudder to think at letting certain people have control of it. It is content related. Ultimately what they want to control and police is the content. They're liberals! They want to eliminate opposing points of view. They do it with political correctness, which is censorship. They do it in the Drive-By Media by simply ignoring all kinds of news that is not palatable or it conflicts with their worldview, they just ignore it and don't even cover it. It's inarguable.

I think history has shown that the worst way to [try to] bring people over and actually change public opinion is by insult and applied degradation of them.

You'd think people would realize they're bad at multitasking and would quit. But a cognitive illusion sets in, fueled in part by a dopamine-adrenaline feedback loop, in which multitaskers think they are doing great.

I can explain how a person with autism thinks. I am very, very interested in how people think. It's been a gradual process of learning more and more about how my thinking process is different. You know it's bottom up - you take specific examples to make concepts and then I put them in categories.

I think that's the thing that memoir can do more than anything it does; it testifies and bears witness to the existence of people whose lives, pleasures and virtues would never have been testified to without my having done it. That makes me really glad.