Stanley Milgram

I started with the belief that every person who came to the laboratory was free to accept or to reject the dictates…

— Stanley Milgram

Obedience is the psychological mechanism that links individual action to political purpose. It is the dispositional cement that binds men to systems…

— Stanley Milgram

It may be that we are puppets-puppets controlled by the strings of society. But at least we are puppets with perception, with…

— Stanley Milgram

When an individual wishes to stand in opposition to authority, he does best to find support for his position from others in…

— Stanley Milgram

Relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.

— Stanley Milgram

Each individual possesses a conscience which to a greater or lesser degree serves to restrain the unimpeded flow of impulses destructive to…

— Stanley Milgram

“It has been reliably established that from 1933 to 1945 millions of innocent people were systematically slaughtered on command. Gas chambers were…

— Stanley Milgram

I would say, on the basis of having observe a thousand people in the experiment and having my own intuition shaped and…

— Stanley Milgram

The state produced in the laboratory may be likened to a light doze, compared to the profound slumber induced by the preponent…

— Stanley Milgram

The essence in obedience consists in the fact that a person comes to view himself as an instrument for carrying out another…

— Stanley Milgram

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

— Stanley Milgram

The soldier does not wish to appear a coward, disloyal, or un-American. The situation has been so defined that he can see…

— Stanley Milgram

Although a person acting under authority performs actions that seem to violate standards of conscience, it would not be true to say…

— Stanley Milgram

Some system of authority is a requirement of all communal living, and it is only the man dwelling in isolation who is…

— Stanley Milgram

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

— Stanley Milgram

A substantial proportion of people do what they are told to do, irrespective of the content of the act, and without pangs…

— Stanley Milgram

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

— Stanley Milgram

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

— Stanley Milgram

Even Eichmann was sickened when he toured the concentration camps.

— Stanley Milgram

It is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself…

— Stanley Milgram

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process.

— Stanley Milgram

“The importation and enslavement of millions of lack people, the destruction of the American Indian population, the internment of Japanese American, the…

— Stanley Milgram

The key to the behavior of subjects lies not in pent-up anger or aggression, but in the nature of their relationship to…

— Stanley Milgram

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

— Stanley Milgram

It is easy to ignore responsibility when one is only an intermediate link in a chain of action.

— Stanley Milgram