Robert Jay Lifton quotes | Thousands Of Quotes

Search for quotes

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.

Robert Jay Lifton

I learned a lot from Vietnam veterans, especially as some of them turned against their own war.

Robert Jay Lifton

I don't have the feeling that as a very young person I read books that absolutely made their mark on my mind.

Robert Jay Lifton

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.

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.

Robert Jay Lifton

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.

Robert Jay Lifton

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.

Robert Jay Lifton

And I thought about the psychic numbing involved in strategic projections of using hydrogen bombs or nuclear weapons of any kind. And I also thought about ways in which all of us undergo what could be called the numbing of everyday life.

Robert Jay Lifton

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.

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.

Robert Jay Lifton

As a kid I was fascinated with sports, and I loved sports more than anything else. The first books I read were about sports, like books about Baseball Joe, as one baseball hero was called.

Robert Jay Lifton

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.

Robert Jay Lifton

It may sound terrible, but I often say that the military saved me from a conventional life in the United States and I've never really thanked them for it, because I haven't exactly been pro-military in my work.

Robert Jay Lifton

It was because of my deep concerns about nuclear weapons that I went to Hiroshima. And then I was astounded in Hiroshima to find that nobody had really studied it.

Robert Jay Lifton

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.

Robert Jay Lifton