Quotes by Robert Jay Lifton

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.

Atheist

Father

Mother

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.

People

Real

Years

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.

Everyday

Hydrogen Bomb

Psychics

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

Heavy

Prose

Writing

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.

Baseball

Book

Sports

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.

School

Two

Years

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.

Dying

People

Talking

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.

Believe

Challenges

Evil

Donald Trump both disbelieves and believes in falsehoods, so that when he did thrive on his longstanding – the claim that Obama was not born in the United States – he’s crazy like a fox in manipulating it because it gave him his political entrée onto the national stage. In order to make your falsehoods powerful, you have to believe in them in some extent. And that’s why we simplify things if we say that Trump either believes nothing in his falsehoods and is just manipulating us like a fox or he completely believes them.

Believe

Crazy

Powerful

Donald Trump doesn’t have clear contact with reality, though I’m not sure it qualifies as a bona fide delusion. He needs things to be a certain way even though they aren’t, and that’s one reason he lies. There can also be a conscious manipulative element to it. When he put forward, and politically thrived on, the falsehood of President Obama’s birth in Kenya, outside the United States, he was manipulating that lie as well as undoubtedly believing it in part, at least in a segment of his personality.

Believe

Lying

Reality

Follow The Behaviour University in order to get the greatest quotes from the greatest people of all time so that you can tap into your own greatness.

Adults

Air

Analysis

Atheist

Baseball

Belief

Believe

Blood

Book

Boys

Challenges

Character

Childhood

Country

Crazy

Destiny

Doctors

Dying

Emotional

Everyday

Evil

Father

Feelings

Fighting

Giving

Global Warming

Guilt

Healing

Heavy

Holocaust

Hydrogen Bomb

Ideas

Important

Interesting

Isolation

Issues

Journey

Language

Lying

Mean

Men

Mental Illness

Military

Mind

Mindset

Mother

Narcissism

New York

Order

People

The Future Blueprint

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The Home Therapist: Anti Anxiety

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The Autobiography

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Quotes by Robert Jay Lifton

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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