Lifton Quotes

#1. That is, we are bombarded by all kinds of images and influences and we have to fend some of them off if we're to take in any of them, or to carry through just our ordinary day's work, or really deepen whatever we have to do or say.

Robert Jay Lifton

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. 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.

Robert Jay Lifton

#6. And I was troubled by the heavy-handed prose of so much psychoanalytic writing, which seemed drowned in its own concepts.

Robert Jay Lifton

#7. 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

#8. David Frankfurter's valuable, well-written study takes us to the far reaches of demonology. In documenting the harm done by labeling others evil, he poses a challenge to those of us who believe, however regretfully, in the necessity of the concept.

Robert Jay Lifton

#9. As a breath on glass, -
As witch-fires that burn,
The gods and monsters pass,
Are dust, and return.
("The Face of the Skies")

George Sterling

#10. Is it not love that knows how to make smooth things rough and rough things smooth?

Vikram Seth

#11. 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

#12. In sum, doubling is the psychological means by which one invokes the evil potential of the self. That evil is neither inherent in the self nor foreign to it. To live out the doubling and call forth the evil is a moral choice for which one is responsible, whatever the level of consciousness involved.

Robert Jay Lifton

#13. Back in 1968, when I was 30, my entire life blew up. I had a life plan, and it collapsed for no rational reason.

Gail Sheehy

#14. 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

#15. The one-sided exploitation of existential guilt is thought reform's trump card, and perhaps its most important source of emotional influence over its participants. Revolving around it are issues most decisive to thought reform's outcome.

Robert Jay Lifton

#16. Sometimes it's said that psychiatrists are doctors who are frightened by the sight of blood. I might have fallen into that category.

Robert Jay Lifton

#17. 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.

Robert Jay Lifton

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. I feel like at the Olympics I gave the best performance of my life and I wasn't rewarded for that as an athlete. Yes, my fans and my mom were happy about it, but I didn't win that gold medal.

Johnny Weir

#21. I never quite envisioned myself a proper doctor under that white coat, but I was interested in the idea of healing and in the psychological dimension rather early on.

Robert Jay Lifton

#22. 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

#23. 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

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Madrid Travel Guide

#25. Yes, I've been very preoccupied with the survivor all through my work.

Robert Jay Lifton

#26. I struggled with each of these studies and I was uncertain about what they meant, and often confused, and then I tried to put together what I was seeing.

Robert Jay Lifton

#27. The ditties blend Japanese popular culture themes of saccharine, childlike goodness and viciously detached sadism, which Aum drew upon as it tapped the barely suppressed rage of the young against their society.

Robert Jay Lifton

#28. Some victories are merely defeat wearing the wrong clothing

Kiersten White

#29. One of the things that I heard for years and years, never drive Russia and China together. And Obama has done that.

Donald Trump

#30. 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

#31. The incident does not mean that most Japanese were not appalled by Aum. It does suggest that many young adults viewed their society as so corrupt and hypocritical that any degree of mockery, if not violence against it, was justified.

Robert Jay Lifton

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

Robert Jay Lifton

#33. 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

#34. Death reduces all men to the same rank. It strips the rich of his millions and the poor man of his rags ... Death knows no age limits, no partiality. It is a thing that all men fear.

Billy Graham

#35. 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

#36. 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