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 sup….

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,….

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 ….

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

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

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 ….

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 th….

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, coura….

A substantial proportion of people do what they are told to do, irrespective of the content of the act, and without pangs of conscience, so long as t….

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 ….

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process..

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….

Each individual possesses a conscience which to a greater or lesser degree serves to restrain the unimpeded flow of impulses destructive to others. B….

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

But the culture has failed, almost entirely, in inculcating internal controls on actions that have their origin in authority. For this reason, the la….

Even Eichmann was sickened when he toured the concentration camps..

Obedience is the psychological mechanism that links individual action to political purpose. It is the dispositional cement that binds men to systems ….

Relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority..

And perhaps our awareness is the first step to our liberation..

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..

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