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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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"Each "way of thinking" has its own shape and color, which wax and wane like the moon."

"How can the thoughts be stopped? Tell the thoughts, 'You take care of your own issues; I am not on your side.' That way you will sit on God's side."

"Of course, in our train of thought, we would all like to think we're on the right track, or at least the same railroad company as the right track."

"The moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn't thought about. At that moment he's alive and you leave it to him."

"A man's face as a rule says more, and more interesting things, than his mouth, for it is a compendium of everything his mouth will ever say, in that it is the monogram of all this man's thoughts and aspirations."
Explore more quotes by Robert Jay Lifton

"I'm a Brooklyn boy. I was born in Brooklyn, New York, and raised there, and spent most of my childhood there."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."
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