For A Person To Feel

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 Support Provided By Men For Each Other Is The Strongest Bulwark We Have Against The Excesses Of Authority.

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, That If A System Of Death Camps Were Set Up In The United States Of The Sort We Had Seen In Nazi Germany, One Would Find Sufficient Personnel For Those Camps In Any Medium-sized American Town.

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 Therefore No Longer Regards Himself As Responsible For His Actions.

But The Culture Has Failed, Almost Entirely, In Inculcating Internal Controls On Actions That Have Their Origin In Authority. For This Reason, The Latter Constitutes A Far Greater Danger To Human Survival.

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 A Conception Of Human Dignity Insofar As It Sees In Each Man A Capacity For Choosing His Own Behavior. And As It Turned Out, Many Subjects Did, Indeed, Choose To Reject The Experimenter's Commands, Providing A Powerful Affirmation Of Human Ideals.