Stanley Milgram Quotes & Sayings

Obedience is the psychological mechanism that links individual action to political purpose. It is the dispositional cement that binds men to systems of authority. — Stanley Milgram

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

The essence in obedience consists in the fact that a person comes to view himself as an instrument for carrying out another person's wishes and he therefore no longer regards himself as responsible for his actions. — Stanley Milgram

The soldier does not wish to appear a coward, disloyal, or un-American. The situation has been so defined that he can see himself as patriotic, courageous, and manly only through compliance. — Stanley Milgram

I would say, on the basis of having observe a thousand people in the experiment and having my own intuition shaped and informed by these experiments, that if a system of death camps were set up in the United States of the sort we had seen in Nazi Germany, one would find sufficient personnel for those camps in any medium-sized American town. — Stanley Milgram

When an individual wishes to stand in opposition to authority, he does best to find support for his position from others in his group. The mutual support provided by men for each other is the strongest bulwark we have against the excesses of authority. — Stanley Milgram

Control the manner in which a man interprets his world, and you have gone a long way toward controlling his behavior. That is why ideology, an attempt to interpret the condition of man, is always a prominent feature of revolutions, wars, and other circumstances in which individuals are called upon to perform extraordinary action. — Stanley Milgram

Each individual possesses a conscience which to a greater or lesser degree serves to restrain the unimpeded flow of impulses destructive to others. But when he merges his person into an organizational structure, a new creature replaces autonomous man, unhindered by the limitations of individual morality, freed of humane inhibition, mindful only of the sanctions of authority. — Stanley Milgram

It is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act. — Stanley Milgram

It may be that we are puppets-puppets controlled by the strings of society. But at least we are puppets with perception, with awareness. And perhaps our awareness is the first step to our liberation. (1974)
— Stanley Milgram

Even Eichmann was sickened when he toured the concentration camps ... — Stanley Milgram

For a person to feel responsible for his actions, he must sense that the behavior has flowed from the self. — Stanley Milgram

It has been reliably established that from 1933 to 1945 millions of innocent people were systematically slaughtered on command. Gas chambers
were built, death camps were guarded, daily quotas of corpses were produced with the same efficiency
as the manufacture of appliances. These inhumane policies may have originated in the mind of a single
person, but they could only have been carried out on a massive scale if a very large number of people
obeyed orders. — Stanley Milgram

Although a person acting under authority performs actions that seem to violate standards of conscience, it would not be true to say that he loses his moral sense. Instead, it acquires a radically different focus. He does not respond with a moral sentiment to the actions he performs. Rather, his moral concern now shifts to a consideration of how well he is living up to the expectations that the authority has of him. — Stanley Milgram

Only in action can you fully realize the forces operative in social behavior. That is why I am an experimentalist. — Stanley Milgram

Perhaps the challenge is to invent the political structure that will give conscience a better chance against authority. — Stanley Milgram

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority. — Stanley Milgram

The importation and enslavement of millions of lack people, the destruction of the American Indian population, the internment of Japanese American, the use of napalm against civilians in Vietnam, all are harsh policies that originated in the authority of a democratic nation, and were responded to with the expected obedience. — Stanley Milgram

And perhaps our awareness is the first step to our liberation. — Stanley Milgram

Some system of authority is a requirement of all communal living, and it is only the man dwelling in isolation who is not forced to respond, through defiance or submission, to the commands of others. — Stanley Milgram

I started with the belief that every person who came to the laboratory was free to accept or to reject the dictates of authority. This view sustains a conception of human dignity insofar as it sees in each man a capacity for choosing his own behavior. And as it turned out, many subjects did, indeed, choose to reject the experimenter's commands, providing a powerful affirmation of human ideals. — Stanley Milgram

But the culture has failed, almost entirely, in inculcating internal controls on actions that have their origin in authority. For this reason, the latter constitutes a far greater danger to human survival. — Stanley Milgram

It is easy to ignore responsibility when one is only an intermediate link in a chain of action. — Stanley Milgram