Stanley Milgram Quotes

The soldier does not wish to appear a coward, disloyal, or un-American. The situation has been so defined that he can see himself as patriotic, courageous, and manly only through compliance.

When an individual wishes to stand in opposition to authority, he does best to find support for his position from others in his group. The mutual support provided by men for each other is the strongest bulwark we have against the excesses of authority.

I started with the belief that every person who came to the laboratory was free to accept or to reject the dictates of authority. This view sustains a conception of human dignity insofar as it sees in each man a capacity for choosing his own behavior. And as it turned out, many subjects did, indeed, choose to reject the experimenter's commands, providing a powerful affirmation of human ideals.

Some system of authority is a requirement of all communal living, and it is only the man dwelling in isolation who is not forced to respond, through defiance or submission, to the commands of others.

Perhaps the challenge is to invent the political structure that will give conscience a better chance against authority.

Control the manner in which a man interprets his world, and you have gone a long way toward controlling his behavior. That is why ideology, an attempt to interpret the condition of man, is always a prominent feature of revolutions, wars, and other circumstances in which individuals are called upon to perform extraordinary action.

It has been reliably established that from 1933 to 1945 millions of innocent people were systematically slaughtered on command. Gas chambers
were built, death camps were guarded, daily quotas of corpses were produced with the same efficiency
as the manufacture of appliances. These inhumane policies may have originated in the mind of a single
person, but they could only have been carried out on a massive scale if a very large number of people
obeyed orders.

Authority systems must be based on people arranged in a hierarchy. Thus the critical question in determining control is, Who is over whom? How much over is far less important than the visible presence of a ranked ordering.

It may be that we are puppets-puppets controlled by the strings of society. But at least we are puppets with perception, with awareness. And perhaps our awareness is the first step to our liberation. (1974)

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.

There is a propensity for people to accept definitions of action provided by legitimate authority

And perhaps our awareness is the first step to our liberation.

Only in action can you fully realize the forces operative in social behavior. That is why I am an experimentalist.

The essence in obedience consists in the fact that a person comes to view himself as an instrument for carrying out another person's wishes and he therefore no longer regards himself as responsible for his actions.

For a person to feel responsible for his actions, he must sense that the behavior has flowed from the self.

Even Eichmann was sickened when he toured the concentration camps ...

The disappearance of a sense of responsibility is the most far-reaching consequence of submission to authority.

It is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act.