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"I did the first study because I had been exposed to something that I took to be important and interesting - this thought reform process - in the military."
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"We seldom find people ungrateful so long as it is thought we can serve them."
"I've been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library."
"Too much thought can find fault in anything, even if there is no fault to be found."
"Even if things were the same, people's perception of them might have been very different back then. The darkness of night was probably deeper then, so the moon must have been that much bigger and brighter."
"The beginning of thought is in disagreement - not only with others but also with ourselves."
"It is especially important to encourage unorthodox thinking when the situation is critical: At such moments every new word and fresh thought is more precious than gold. Indeed, people must not be deprived of the right to think their own thoughts."
"A room hung with pictures is a room hung with thoughts."
"In Socrates' thought the two marks of individual self-consciousness appear; it is practical and it is social."
Explore more quotes by Robert Jay Lifton
"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."
"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 talking about death all the time, about people dying all around them, about their own fear of death."
"I learned a lot from Vietnam veterans, especially as some of them turned against their own war."
"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."
"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."
"When I was still in my psychiatric residency training in New York City, I was subjected to the doctor draft of that time, during the early fifties, at the time of the Korean War."
"Sometimes it's said that psychiatrists are doctors who are frightened by the sight of blood. I might have fallen into that category."
"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."
"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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