Robert Jay Quotes & Sayings

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

I learned a lot from Vietnam veterans, especially as some of them turned against their own war. — Robert Jay Lifton

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

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

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

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

When we consider further the social and psychological roots of the collective urge to kill the world, we are likely to see more of ourselves in it and to begin to think of such groups as something of a dark "cultural underground" of our own society. We are also likely to discover that whatever renders our society more decent and more inclusive in its benefits is likely to undermine the totalistic impulse to destroy everything. — Robert Jay Lifton

I don't understand the United Nations. They have selected Iran to sit on the U.N.'s women's rights panel. Iran! Also on the panel - Ben Roethlisberger, Chris Brown, Phil Spector, Robert Blake and committee chairman O.J. Simpson. — Jay Leno

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

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

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

For inspiration, I would turn again and again to Lieutenant Jason "Jay" Redman, a Navy SEAL who had been shot seven times and had undergone nearly two dozen surgeries. He had placed a hand-drawn sign on the door to his room at Bethesda Naval Hospital. It read: ATTENTION. To all who enter here. If you are coming into this room with sorrow or to feel sorry for my wounds, go elsewhere. The wounds I received I got in a job I love, doing it for people I love, supporting the freedom of a country I deeply love. I am incredibly tough and will make a full recovery. What is full? That is the absolute utmost physically my body has the ability to recover. Then I will push that about 20% further through sheer mental tenacity. This room you are about to enter is a room of fun, optimism, and intense rapid regrowth. If you are not prepared for that, go elsewhere. From: The Management. — Robert M. Gates

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

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

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

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

Over the fireplace was the portrait of his father's first wife, Robert's mother, Olive. Jay hated that painting. There she was, solemn and saintly, looking down her long nose at all who came after her. When she caught a fever and died suddenly at the age of twenty-nine his father had remarried, but he never forgot his first love. He treated Jay's mother, Alicia, like a mistress, a plaything with no status and no rights; and he made Jay feel almost like an illegitimate son. Robert was the firstborn, the heir, the special one. Jay sometimes wanted to ask whether it had been an immaculate conception and a virgin birth. — Ken Follett

Time magazine's Jay Carney and Richard Stengel are now in government while Obama aides David Axelrod and Robert Gibbs are commentators on MSNBC. — Glenn Greenwald

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

Few generals were as brilliant as Robert E. Lee and few battles as titanic
and puzzling
as Gettysburg. Why did Lee fail? In Lost Triumph, Tom Carhart offers a bold and provocative new assessment. Agree or disagree, it is sure to stimulate debate among even the most seasoned Civil War buffs. — Jay Winik

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

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

Jay-Z is more naturally gifted. He didn't depend as much as 50 did on his personal story. Jay-Z has a great story, he came from a pretty rough background. But 50's early success was so much fueled on the story and where he came from. With Jay-Z, I feel he has a more natural gift for language and for music itself. 50 really had to study and work at it much harder. — Robert Greene

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

Yes, I've been very preoccupied with the survivor all through my work. — Robert Jay Lifton

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

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

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

I want to work with Jay-Z. — Robert Wilson

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

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

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

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

I have written about some truly great writers - John Steinbeck, Robert Frost, and William Faulkner. Faulkner and Frost were the very peaks of American poetry and fiction in the 20th century. — Jay Parini

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

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

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