Top 45 Philip Zimbardo Quotes
#1. If you want to change a person, you've got to change the situation.
Philip Zimbardo
#2. Companies that model best practices, that model the most upstanding principles, end up as the most profitable. It's not a trade of profits versus principles.
Philip Zimbardo
#3. There are no limits to what I would do to make my classes exciting, interesting, unpredictable.
Philip Zimbardo
#4. Many cults start off with high ideals that get corrupted by leaders or their board of advisors who become power-hungry and dominate and control members' lives. No group with high ideals starts off as a 'cult'; they become one when their errant ways are exposed.
Philip Zimbardo
#5. Where can you find purpose? Like success and happiness, our purpose exists in the present, and we constantly strive toward the future to maintain it. What it is for which we strive is up to each of us. The important thing is that we strive toward something.
Philip Zimbardo
#6. Our time is brief, and it will pass no matter what we do. So let us have purpose in spending it. Let us spend it so that our time matters to each of us, and matters to all those whose lives we touch.
Philip Zimbardo
#7. Most of the evil of the world comes about not out of evil motives, but somebody saying 'get with the program, be a team player;' this is what we saw at Enron, this is what we saw in the Nixon administration with their scandal.
Philip Zimbardo
#10. Boys are 30 percent more likely than girls to drop out of school. In Canada, five boys drop out for every three girls. Girls outperform boys now at every level, from elementary school to graduate school.
Philip Zimbardo
#11. The Devil's strategy for our times is to trivialize human existence and isolate us from one another while creating the delusion that the reasons are time pressures, work demands or economic anxieties.
Philip Zimbardo
#12. Bullies are often people who are shy and can't make friends easily, so, as the theme of the movie 'A Bronx Tale' tells us, it is better to be feared if you can't be loved.
Philip Zimbardo
#13. What happens when good people are put into an evil place? Do they triumph or does the situation dominate their past history and morality?
Philip Zimbardo
#14. Time is the backdrop of our lives and the very fabric of the cosmos.
Philip Zimbardo
#15. A good cult delivers on its promises. A good cult nourishes the needs of its members, has transparency and integrity, and creates provisions for challenging its leadership openly. A good cult expands the freedoms and well-being of its members rather than limits them.
Philip Zimbardo
#16. I was discriminated against because I was Jewish, Italian, black and Puerto Rican. But maybe the worst prejudice I experienced was against the poor. I grew up on welfare and often had to move in the middle of the night because we couldn't pay the rent.
Philip Zimbardo
#17. Depending on whom you ask, time is money, time is love, time is work, time is play, time is enjoying friends, time is raising children, and time is much more. Time is what you make of it.
Philip Zimbardo
#18. While no one can change events that occurred in the past, everyone can change attitudes and beliefs about them.
Philip Zimbardo
#19. I started studying shyness in adults in 1972. Shyness operates at so many different levels. Out of that research came the Stanford shyness clinic in 1977.
Philip Zimbardo
#20. That human behavior is more influenced by things outside of us than inside. The 'situation' is the external environment. The inner environment is genes, moral history, religious training.
Philip Zimbardo
#21. Coming from New York, I know that if you go by a delicatessen, and you put a sweet cucumber in the vinegar barrel, the cucumber might say, "No, I want to retain my sweetness." But it's hopeless. The barrel will turn the sweet cucumber into a pickle. You can't be a sweet cucumber in a vinegar barrel.
Philip Zimbardo
#22. Most of us fail to appreciate the extent to which our behavior is under situational control, because we prefer to believe that is all is internally generated. We wander around cloaked in an illusion of vulnerability, mis-armed with an arrogance of free will and rationality.
Philip Zimbardo
#23. What troubles me is the Internet and the electronic technology revolution. Shyness is fueled in part by so many people spending huge amounts of time alone, isolated on e-mail, in chat rooms, which reduces their face-to-face contact with other people.
Philip Zimbardo
#24. Heroes are Ordinary People whose social action is Extra-Ordinary/ who ACT when others are passive, who give up EGO-centrism for SOCIO-centrism.
Philip Zimbardo
#25. The line between good and evil is movable and it's permeable.
Philip Zimbardo
#26. The Stanford prison experiment came out of class exercises in which I encouraged students to understand the dynamics of prison life.
Philip Zimbardo
#27. Careers in virtually all academic disciplines are fostered by being a superstar who knows more about one subject than anyone else in the world.
Philip Zimbardo
#28. When someone is anonymous, it opens the door to all kinds of antisocial behavior, as seen by the Ku Klux Klan.
Philip Zimbardo
#29. Bullying is an evil because it not only destroys the life of the kid who's bullied, but also makes everyone in the class who knows this is going on feel guilty for not doing anything.
Philip Zimbardo
#30. At North Hollywood High School, I was shunned by everyone. I would sit down in the cafeteria, and students would get up from the table and walk away. They thought I was from the Mafia.
Philip Zimbardo
#31. As a result of the prison study, I really became more aware of the central role of power in our lives. I became more aware of the power I have as a teacher. I started consciously doing things to minimize the negative use of power in the classroom. I encouraged students to challenge me.
Philip Zimbardo
#32. Prejudice and discrimination have always been a big part of my life. When I was 6, I got beat up and called dirty Jew boy because they thought I looked Jewish.
Philip Zimbardo
#33. Time matters because we are finite, because time is the medium in which we live our lives.
Philip Zimbardo
#34. My early childhood prepared me to be a social psychologist. I grew up in a South Bronx ghetto in a very poor family. From Sicilian origin, I was the first person in my family to complete high school, let alone go to college.
Philip Zimbardo
#35. There are times when external circumstances can overwhelm us, and we do things we never thought. If you're not aware that this can happen, you can be seduced by evil. We need inoculations against our own potential for evil. We have to acknowledge it. Then we can change it.
Philip Zimbardo
#36. The first time I spoke publicly about the Stanford Prison Experiment, Stanley Milgram told me: Your study is going to take all the ethical heat off of my back. People are now going to say yours is the most unethical study ever, and not mine.
Philip Zimbardo
#37. Academic success depends on research and publications.
Philip Zimbardo
#38. Bullies may be the perpetrators of evil, but it is the evil of passivity of all those who know what is happening and never intervene that perpetuates such abuse.
Philip Zimbardo
#39. The world is, was, will always be filled with good and evil, because good and evil is the yin and yang of the human condition.
Philip Zimbardo
#40. Boys' brains are being digitally rewired for change, novelty, excitement and constant arousal. That means they're totally out of sync in traditional classes, which are analog, static, interactively passive.
Philip Zimbardo
#41. It was God who created hell as a place to store evil. He didn't do a good job of keeping it there though.
Philip Zimbardo
#42. After doing psychology for half a century, my passion for all of it is greater than ever.
Philip Zimbardo
#43. When I look back on it, I think, "Why didn't you stop the cruelty earlier?" To stand back was contrary to my upbringing and nature. When I stood back as a noninterfering experimental scientist, I was, in a sense, as drawn into the power of the situation as any prisoners and guards.
Philip Zimbardo
#44. Ideas for my first experiments in human aggression came from discussions we had in a research seminar about William Golding's 'Lord of the Flies.'
Philip Zimbardo
#45. You are not the same person working alone as you are in a group; in a romantic setting versus an educational one; when you are with close friends or in an anonymous crowd; or when you are traveling abroad as when at home base.
Philip Zimbardo
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