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"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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"We should not judge people by their peak of excellence; but by the distance they have traveled from the point where they started."
"When people are taken out of their depths they lose their heads, no matter how charming a bluff they may put up."
"I believe that in every country the people themselves are more peaceably and liberally inclined than their governments."
"Few people at the beginning of the nineteenth century needed an adman to tell them what they wanted."
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."
"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."
"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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