36 Quotes by Stanley Milgram

It has been reliably established that from 1933 to 1945 millions of innocent people were systematically slaughtered on command. Gas chamberswere built, death camps were guarded, daily quotas of corpses were produced with the same efficiencyas the manufacture of appliances. These inhumane policies may have originated in the mind of a singleperson, but they could only have been carried out on a massive scale if a very large number of peopleobeyed orders.

The importation and enslavement of millions of lack people, the destruction of the American Indian population, the internment of Japanese American, the use of napalm against civilians in Vietnam, all are harsh policies that originated in the authority of a democratic nation, and were responded to with the expected obedience.

It is easy to ignore responsibility when one is only an intermediate link in a chain of action.

With numbing regularity, good people were seen to knuckle under the demands of authority and perform actions that were callous and severe,

The state produced in the laboratory may be likened to a light doze, compared to the profound slumber induced by the preponent authority system of a national government.

The key to the behavior of subjects lies not in pent-up anger or aggression, but in the nature of their relationship to authority. They have given themselves to the authority; they see themselves as instruments for the execution of his wishes; once so defined, they are unable to break free.

Even Eichmann was sickened when he toured the concentration camps...

Some system of authority is a requirement of all communal living, and it is only the man dwelling in isolation who is not forced to respond, through defiance or submission, to the commands of others.

Only in action can you fully realize the forces operative in social behavior. That is why I am an experimentalist.