Parenting & Family Quote by Abraham Maslow

Maslow slips a radical optimism into the calm, lab-coat cadence of “all the evidence that we have.” He’s not waxing poetic about human goodness; he’s trying to smuggle a philosophical stake into psychology while sounding empirically responsible. The sentence builds like a legal brief: evidence, reasonableness, practically every human being, certainly almost every newborn. That stacking of qualifiers is the tell. Maslow knows he’s making a big claim about human nature, and he buttresses it with hedges that make the claim harder to dismiss as mere sentiment.

The specific intent is to reframe what a “normal” person is. In mid-century psychology, the dominant languages were pathology and control: neurosis, conditioning, deficits, dysfunction. Maslow’s humanistic project needed a competing default setting. If people carry “an active will toward health,” then therapy is less about fixing broken machinery and more about removing obstacles and supplying conditions. The clinician stops being a mechanic and becomes a gardener.

The subtext has bite: if growth is an impulse, then many of the ways institutions operate - punitive schools, alienating workplaces, moralizing politics - aren’t neutral; they’re growth-suppressing environments. Maslow’s “newborn baby” is strategic too. It tries to pre-empt the cynic’s favorite rebuttal (“people are selfish”) by pointing to a pre-social baseline: before ideology, before trauma, there’s motion toward becoming.

Context matters: postwar America, rising consumer abundance, Cold War conformity, and a psychology eager to look scientific. Maslow offers a third lane between Freudian gloom and behaviorist determinism: a theory of motivation that flatters human possibility while insisting it’s observable, not mystical.