Stanley Milgram

"The conditions that produce obedience are not anomalous but inherent to social structures."

"Understanding human nature requires examining our capacity for both good and harm."

"The diffusion of responsibility is perhaps the most insidious aspect of institutional obedience."

"Authority transforms the moral landscape in ways we barely comprehend."

"Resistance to authority becomes possible only when we recognize its power over us."

"The ordinary person contains the capacity for extraordinary moral failure."

"Authority derives its power from our willingness to delegate moral responsibility."

"Understanding obedience illuminates the human condition itself."

"The psychological distance we maintain from our actions determines their moral quality."

"The individual who is forced to act against his conscience is a being deprived of inner freedom."

"Obedience is not a virtue but a problem to be understood."

"The disappearance of a sense of responsibility is the most far-reaching consequence of submission to authority."

"Perhaps the most fundamental lesson of our study is that ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process."

"The social psychology of this century reveals a major lesson: often it is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines his conduct."

"I set out to create a laboratory model of the essential features of the Holocaust."

"Authority generates a psychological tendency to shift responsibility away from the self."

"What is fascinating is the willingness of people to submit to authority."

"The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study."

"Astonishingly, the psychological impact on those who perform the experiment is often more disturbing than the impact on those who are supposedly harmed by it."

"The results are both amazing and troubling. They raise the fundamental question of human nature and morality."

"If one group has authority over another, the authority holders will naturally develop a sense of superiority."

"We are not just passive receptors of the social world but active agents interpreting and responding to it."

"The capacity for man to abandon his humanity, it seems, does not require pathological conditions; it requires only that he behave as an obedient subject and define himself in the context of the legality of his actions."

"The essence of obedience is that a person comes to view himself as the instrument for carrying out another person's wishes."

"I found that subjects who questioned the experimenter, who asked for clarification about their responsibility, were far more likely to disobey."

"The problem, then, is not that people are obedient, but that people are obedient to authority without examining the content of the authority's commands."

"Many people, perhaps most people, do not have highly developed moral convictions. Their ethics are situational."

"A substantial proportion of people do what they are told to do, irrespective of the content of the act and without limitations of conscience."

"The shock generator became a kind of symbol of authority."

"In everyday life, we are bombarded with orders and commands from many authorities."