Quotes from Philip G. Zimbardo

Most of us hide behind egocentric biases that generate the illusion that we are special.

The ideal of the military hero is clearly echoed in other contexts, and it includes those who routinely risk their health and lives in the line of duty, such as police officers, firefighters, and paramedics.

That seduction or initiation into evil can be understood by recognizing that most actors are not solitary figures improvising on the empty stage of life. Rather, they are often an ensemble of different players, on a stage with various props and changing costumes, scripts, and stage directions from producers and directors.

Time and oppression are the fathers of rebellious invention.

One can choose to go back toward safety or forward toward growth. Growth must be chosen again and again; fear must be overcome again and again. – Abraham Maslow, humanist psychologist

At that moment, the Stanford Prison Experiment was changed into the Stanford Prison, not by any top-down formal declarations by the staff but by this bottom-up declaration from one of the prisoners themselves.

The avoidance of reality has pervaded our language and even the way we understand what's happening around us, as the late comedian George Carlin pointed out. People have invented a 'soft language' to insulate themselves from the truth, he said, 'toilet paper became bathroom tissue … The [garbage] dump became a landfill … Partly cloudy became partly sunny.

Added to my distress was the realization that many of the "independent" investigative reports clearly laid the blame for the abuses at the feet of senior officers

A life well lived is the best antidote to that fatal truth. Be active, not a passive worrywart. Find magic in the moment, joy in making someone smile. Listen to a lover's sigh; look into the dancing eyes of a child you made feel special. Most of all, marvel at the wonder that eons of evolutionary time and all your unique experiences have joined to comprise the symphony that is YOU.

There is an important message here about the power of words, labels, rhetoric, and stereotyped labeling, to be used for good or evil. We need to refashion the childhood rhyme "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never harm me," to alter the last phrase to "but bad names can kill me, and good ones can comfort me.

diffusion of responsibility, in any form it takes, lowers the inhibition against harming others.

It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. – Frederick Douglass, African-American social reformer and a leader of the abolitionist movement

Change alone is unchanging. —Heraclitus

No one played devil's advocate, a figure that every group needs to avoid foolish or even disastrous decisions like this. It was reminiscent of President John Kennedy's "disastrous" decision to invade Cuba in the Bay of Pigs fiasco.11

United States ranked No. 25 on international comparative tests. In Finland, which ranked No. 1, children don't start formal schooling until they're 7 years old,

Yesterday was too early. Tomorrow will be too late. Today is the day of reckoning for each of us.

While the entire US population has increased by about a third since 1980, the federal prison population has grown at an astonishing rate – by almost 800 per cent. It's still growing – despite the fact that federal prisons are operating at nearly 40 per cent above capacity. Even though this country comprises just 5 per cent of the world's population, we incarcerate almost a quarter of the world's prisoners.

That very day I resolved not to save all of my change until I turned forty. I resolved to have what I termed a little midlife crisis each day of my life in the hope of avoiding a larger one once I reached forty.

Pappas was so affected by this sudden horror that he never again took off his flak jacket. It was reported to me that he always wore his jacket and hard helmet even while showering.

Jedynym koniecznym warunkiem triumfu z?a jest to, ?eby dobrzy ludzie nie robili nic. (Edmund Burke)

The rationale is this: our research will attempt to differentiate between what people bring into a prison situation from what the situation brings out in the people who are there.

Another way of looking at it is, you're putting good people in an evil situation to see who or what wins.

even psychologists are people, subject to the same dynamic processes at a personal level that they study at a professional level.

Einstein himself is reported to have said: When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute and it's longer than any hour. That's relativity.