Milgram Quotes

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. ~ Stanley Milgram

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

And perhaps our awareness is the first step to our liberation. ~ Stanley Milgram

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. ~ Stanley Milgram

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

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

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. ~ Stanley Milgram

I was also beginning to learn about social psychology and the Milgram experiment on obedience to authority figures, which made me think about how malleable our supposedly strict moral codes become in the right conditions. Something that DIVERGENT grapples with. ~ Veronica Roth

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)
~ Stanley Milgram

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. ~ Stanley Milgram

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. ~ Stanley Milgram

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. ~ Stanley Milgram

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. ~ Stanley Milgram

When, on their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, Jerome had played his parents an ethereal, far more beautiful version of 'Hallelujah' by a kid called Buckley, Kiki had thought yes, that's right, our memories are getting more beautiful and less real every day. And then the kid drowned in the Mississippi, recalled Kiki now, looking up from her knees to the colourful painting that hung behind Carlene's empty chair. Jerome had wept: the tears you cry for someone whom you never met who made something beautiful that you loved. Seventeen years earlier, when Lennon died, Kiki had dragged Howard to Central Park and wept while the crowd sang 'All You Need is Love' and Howard ranted bitterly about Milgram and mass psychosis. ~ Zadie Smith

For it is dangerous to attach one's self to the crowd in front, and so long as each one of us is more willing to trust another than to judge for himself, we never show any judgement in the matter of living, but always a blind trust, and a mistake that has been passed on from hand to hand finally involves us and works our destruction. It is the example of other people that is our undoing; let us merely separate ourselves from the crowd, and we shall be made whole. But as it is, the populace,, defending its own iniquity, pits itself against reason. And so we see the same thing happening that happens at the elections, where, when the fickle breeze of popular favour has shifted, the very same persons who chose the praetors wonder that those praetors were chosen. ~ Seneca.

[He] seemed to possess, beneath it all, an immutable sense of self-assurance, but in addition to that, the look of a man ensnared by what he perceived to be his own Duty. A Duty that effervesced inside of him impatiently, dry at the mouth, shaking feverishly, and holding its breath in anticipation for - not his action, but in fact - the fruits of his actions, however distant these may have been. The goal was to satiate its thirst in as few moves as possible, instilling each action with an almost implied necessity for having a motive by which it must exist, which is to say that no action was to be wasted for anything, but only for that which was rooted in some definable and clear-cut purpose...Every action had to be a step in some direction and there could be no dillydallying, for Duty bubbling in the bloodstream for too long brought with it a kind of sickness...from which it was difficult to recover. Neither could there be any reconsideration, for the values to which one has sworn were unassailable and beyond the powers of one individual to reassess. And so, Duty, once instilled, must be allowed to carry on unabated, diverting sustenance away from other aspects of one's character - driving them to a weakened state, brow-beaten by circumstances beyond their immediate control and relegated to their own downtrodden acquiescence to the bravado of the Parasitic Superego, and, as such, cognizant of their growing superfluity. ~ Ashim Shanker

Obligation is a more effective weapon against the Will than any penalty, threat or act of force. ~ Ashim Shanker

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. ~ Stanley Milgram

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. ~ Stanley Milgram

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

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

Even Eichmann was sickened when he toured the concentration camps ... ~ Stanley Milgram

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. ~ Stanley Milgram

The first time I spoke publicly about the Stanford Prison Experiment, Stanley Milgram told me: Your study is going to take all the ethical heat off of my back. People are now going to say yours is the most unethical study ever, and not mine. ~ Philip Zimbardo