Loftus Quotes & Sayings

Without independent corroboration, little can be done to tell a false memory from a true one. — Elizabeth Loftus

I've always had a terrible weakness for beautiful but sad things. — Sylvain Reynard

Zealous conviction is a dangerous substitute for an open mind. — Elizabeth F. Loftus

She was a collector of lost souls. The forgotten, the bypassed, the most beautiful at heart. Rimmel saw beauty no one else saw, and even though how she made others feel was amazing, it was nothing compared to the way it made her shine. — Cambria Hebert

took the slip from his hand and looked at the strangle symbols. — Donna Augustine

Just because someone thinks they remember something in detail, with confidence and with emotion, does not mean that it actually happened, .. False memories have these characteristics too. — Elizabeth Loftus

In real life, as well as in experiments, people can come to believe things that never really happened. — Elizabeth Loftus

When we remember something, we're taking bits and pieces of experience - sometimes from different times and places - and bringing it all together to construct what might feel like a recollection but is actually a construction. — Elizabeth Loftus

Leadership is about integrity, honesty and accountability. All components of trust. — Simon Sinek

Most of the time, perhaps 99 percent of the time, the defendant is guilty; his screams are the final protest of a human being about to lost his most precious possession, his freedom. — Elizabeth F. Loftus

Since the start of the Occupy Wall Street movement, CODEPINK activists have joined the frontlines of the non-violent Occupy movement across the country. — Jodie Evans

Let's Look at Subjective Religious Experiences This Way:
What if ten thousand people went up to a mountain top, saw something, and then they all disagreed with what they saw, even people who largely agreed with each other? Even with this best possible analogy to subjective religious experiences we would still have a reason to think the lack of oxygen caused them all to hallucinate. — John W. Loftus

Cautiously, I allowed myself to feel good at times. I found moments of peace in ... rooms just staring at the knobs of some dresser or listening to the rain in the dark. The less I needed the better I felt. — Charles Bukowski

Memory, like liberty, is a fragile thing. — Elizabeth Loftus

You end up giving up half your salary every time you make a movie because you need the money to make the movie you have in your head. — Allison Anders

My work has made me tolerant of memory mistakes by family and friends. You don't have to call them lies. I think we could be generous and say maybe this is a false memory. — Elizabeth Loftus

Everything in life is unusual until you get accustomed to it -The Scarecrow - The Marvellous Land Of Oz by L. Frank Baum pg 103 chapter 13 — L. Frank Baum

We all have memories that are malleable and susceptible to being contaminated or supplemented in some way. — Elizabeth Loftus

That man has missed something who has never left a brothel at sunrise feeling like throwing himself into the river out of pure disgust. — Gustave Flaubert

To be cautious, one should not take high confidence as any absolute guarantee of anything. — Elizabeth Loftus

We can't reliably distinguish true memories from false memories, — Elizabeth Loftus

You like legs?" she asked.
"On you, yes. On a chicken, I prefer wings and breasts."
She picked up both legs with her fingers. "Then we are going to get along just fine. — Carolyn Brown

Why, a trick horse is kind of like an actor - no dignity, no character of his own. — John Steinbeck

Apple is in a position they've been in a lot of times before. They're like Moses showing the way to the promised land, but they don't actually go there. — Tim O'Reilly

I think anyone can fall in love, if you're open and you're willing, but the real test is sustaining it after all the excitement has worn off. — Simon Van Booy

The psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has shown great courage, in the face of spiteful vested interests, in demonstrating how easy it is for people to concoct memories that are entirely false but which seem, to the victim, every bit as real as true memories. — Richard Dawkins

Ringing assurance that we are not alone ... That we are assisted and defended by a powerful and glorious order of invisible Beings. — Billy Graham

It is therefore perfectly plausible that memories of childhood sexual abuse could be buried for years and then recalled, and that motivated forgetting, dissociative amnesia, or some other mechanism could account for some of the allegations in cases that Loftus has testified in. But because of the way in which the entire debate has been framed around the issue of "repression" and "recovery," these nuances have been largely ignored. — Moheb Costandi

A laboratory analogy to repression can be found in an experiment by A.F. Zeller.
Zeller arranged a situation so that one group of students underwent an unhappy "failure" experience right after they had successfully learned a list of nonsense syllables. When tested later, these subjects showed much poorer recall of the nonsense syllables compared to a control group, who had not experienced failure. When this same "failure" group was later allowed to succeed on the same task that they had earlier failed, their recall showed tremendous improvement. This experiment indicates that when the reason for the repression is removed, when material to be remembered is no longer associated with negative effects, a person no longer experiences retrieval failure. — Elizabeth F. Loftus

[M]any people believe that memory works like a recording device. You just record the information, then you call it up and play it back when you want to answer questions or identify images. But decades of work in psychology has shown that this just isn't true. Our memories are constructive. They're reconstructive. Memory works a little bit more like a Wikipedia page: You can go in there and change it, but so can other people. — Elizabeth F. Loftus

According to the most outspoken and vituperative Skeptics, therapists specializing in recovered memory therapy operate in a neverland of fairy dust and mythic monsters. Woefully out of touch with modern research, engaging in "crude psychiatric analysis," guilty of oversimplification, overextension, and "incestuous opinion citing," these misguided, undertrained, and overzealous clinicians are implanting false memories in the minds of suggestible clients, making "therapeutic lifers" out of their patients and ripping families apart. This — Elizabeth F. Loftus