Robert Jay Lifton Quotes

28 quotes in 573 categories

• I never quite envisioned myself a proper doctor under that white coat, but I was interested in the idea of healing and in the psychological…
• Again, I was influenced by my father, who was very much an atheist and took pride in combating the traditional or orthodox forms of Judaism,…
• But when I went to Hiroshima and began to study or just listen to people's descriptions of their work, it was quite clear they were…
• In sum, doubling is the psychological means by which one invokes the evil potential of the self. That evil is neither inherent in the self…
• And I was troubled by the heavy-handed prose of so much psychoanalytic writing, which seemed drowned in its own concepts.
• And I managed to arrange to get some research support and to stay in Hong Kong for another year and a half, interviewing people coming…
• Sometimes its said that psychiatrists are doctors who are frightened by the sight of blood. I might have fallen into that category.
• I learned a lot from Vietnam veterans, especially as some of them turned against their own war.
• David Frankfurter's valuable, well-written study takes us to the far reaches of demonology. In documenting the harm done by labeling others evil, he poses a…
• Every adult in the world has some sense that he or she might be obliterated at any time by these weapons that we have created.
• One reason that I embarked on a study of Nazi doctors was that in this personal journey, I had the feeling increasingly that I did…
• As a kid I was fascinated with sports, and I loved sports more than anything else. The first books I read were about sports, like…
• The one-sided exploitation of existential guilt is thought reform's trump card, and perhaps its most important source of emotional influence over its participants. Revolving around…
• The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliché. The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly…
• I don't have the feeling that as a very young person I read books that absolutely made their mark on my mind.
• I'm a Brooklyn boy. I was born in Brooklyn, New York, and raised there, and spent most of my childhood there.
• Yes, I've been very preoccupied with the survivor all through my work.
• And I thought about the psychic numbing involved in strategic projections of using hydrogen bombs or nuclear weapons of any kind. And I also thought…
• But I spent just two calendar years at Cornell University, though it was covering more than three years of work, and then went to medical…
• I did the first study because I had been exposed to something that I took to be important and interesting - this thought reform process…

Browse Robert Jay Lifton Quotes by Category