Knowledge Quotes

"Understanding the conditions of obedience is crucial for preventing atrocities."

"The psychological mechanism of obedience operates largely outside conscious awareness."

"Understanding how ordinary people commit atrocities is essential for preventing them."

"In the laboratory and in life, the participant who questions consensus questions the very nature of truth."

"Social influence operates beneath the threshold of awareness, shaping thought before we know we are thinking."

"We underestimate how much of our thinking is social thinking."

"Perception is a social achievement as much as it is an individual one."

"The pressure to conform increases as ambiguity increases and decreases as clarity increases."

"Man knows much more than he understands."

"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function."

"The prison experiment taught us that ordinary people can engage in extraordinary cruelty when placed in certain circumstances."

"Institutions shape behavior more than most people realize or want to admit."

"Understanding why people do bad things is the first step toward preventing those things."

"Curiosity is the lust of the mind."

"Everything is obscure to those who lack understanding."

"The study of geometry cannot take us to heaven."

"Certainty without understanding is as much a prison as doubt."

"The greater the knowledge, the greater the doubt."

"The limits of my language mean the limits of my world."

"If you wish to leave a mark on the world, you do so by accumulating detailed knowledge."

"To understand a sentence means to understand a language."

"If you want to know whether it is raining, go outside and look."

"For a large class of cases of the employment of the word meaning—though not for all—this word can be explained in this way: the meaning of a word is its use in the language."

"Psychology must abandon the introspective method and embrace observable, measurable phenomena."

"The scientific method is our only reliable guide to understanding human nature."

"The greatest discovery of psychology is that humans are infinitely more plastic and malleable than we supposed."

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

"We must acknowledge the 'Lucifer Effect' in ourselves to prevent its manifestation."

"Understanding how good becomes evil is essential for prevention."

"Psychology teaches us humility about our own vulnerability to corruption."