132 Quotes by Philip Zimbardo

Every evil starts with 15 volts.

Sticks and stones can break your bones, but names can kill you.

Being hurt personally triggered a curiosity about how such beliefs are formed.

We want to believe in the essential, unchanging goodness of people, in their power to resist external pressures, in their rational appraisal and then rejection of situational temptations. We invest human nature with God-like qualities, with moral and rational faculties that make us both just and wise. We simplify the complexity of human experience by erecting a seemingly impermeable boundary between Good and Evil.

The line between good and evil is permeable and almost anyone can be induced to cross it when pressured by situational forces.

Heroes are those who can somehow resist the power of the situation and act out of noble motives, or behave in ways that do not demean others when they easily can.

The level of shyness has gone up dramatically in the last decade. I think shyness is an index of social pathology rather than a pathology of the individual.

Human behavior is incredibly pliable, plastic.

Time perspective is one of the most powerful influences on all of human behavior. We're trying to show how people become biased to being exclusively past-, present- or future-oriented.