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"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 out of China, both Westerners and Chinese. And that was my first real research study on thought reform or so-called brainwashing."
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"I was very disappointed that Denzel didn't win Best Actor for The Hurricane because I thought he deserved it."
"Oh, gentlemen, perhaps I really regard myself as an intelligent man only because throughout my entire life I've never been able to start or finish anything. Granted, granted I'm a babbler, a harmless, irksome babbler, as we all are. But what's to be done if the sole and express purpose of every intelligent man is babble--that is, a deliberate pouring from empty into void."
"Far more thought and care go into the composition of any prominent ad in a newspaper or magazine than go into the writing of their features and editorials."
"All thought must, directly or indirectly, by way of certain characters, relate ultimately to intuitions, and therefore, with us, to sensibility, because in no other way can an object be given to us."
"And I think all Nazis didn't see themselves as bad people. I've never met a racist yet who thought he was a racist. Or an anti-Semite who thought they were anti-Semitic."
Explore more quotes by Robert Jay Lifton
"The other thing that happened was my last military assignment - this was in the air force; I had enlisted in order to avoid being drafted as a private, and of course I only practiced medicine or psychiatry in the air force so I was never in any kind of violent combat."
"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 school and did become interested in psychiatry, and even helped form a kind of psychiatry club in medical school."
"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 want to do a Holocaust study and that increasingly I wanted it to be of perpetrators, which I thought was more needed."
"I'm a Brooklyn boy. I was born in Brooklyn, New York, and raised there, and spent most of my childhood there."
"I learned a lot from Vietnam veterans, especially as some of them turned against their own war."
"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."
"I don't have the feeling that as a very young person I read books that absolutely made their mark on my mind."
"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, which his parents and which my mother's parents were very steeped in."
"Sometimes it's said that psychiatrists are doctors who are frightened by the sight of blood. I might have fallen into that category."
"What I found was when I started my first study, and then in subsequent studies, is here you have people under some kind of duress, or I chose to study them because they represented some kind of historical event, as it impacted on them or as they helped to create it."
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