Robert Jay Lifton Quotes

Cult recruiting methods based on dosing victims with the brain chemicals released during capture bonding would make cults even more of a problem than they are now.

The way brainwashing works is subtle and takes a long time.

When you control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his actions.

… cults have used tactics of coercive mind control to negatively impact an estimated 20 million victims in the last ten years. Worldwide figures are even greater.

And internalization is used in this country as a very effective political tool.

In a cult intervention information is presented about the group that the member is most often not aware of.

Scientology delivers what it promises under the guise of tearing away falsity, neuroses, psychoses. It creates a brainwashed, robotic version of you. It's a 'Matrix' of you, so you're communicating with people all the time using Scientology.

Six months after that, I left Taiwan, first for Hong Kong and then for mainland China, where I spent another three months studying still more Chinese and generally kicking around the country.

If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it.

It would be easier to subjugate the entire universe through force of arms than to subjugate the minds of a single village... .

Scientology and all the other cults are one-dimensional, and we live in a three-dimensional world. Cults are as dangerous as drugs. They commit the highest crime: the rape of the soul.

Cults make people sing so hard for so long - because it over-oxygenates the blood and sets them up to faint.

The media know exactly what they're doing, focusing our attention on Arsenio's hairdo. We need to keep our brains brimming with rubbish. If we didn't, we might think about things.

By means of shrewd lies, unremittingly repeated, it is possible to make people believe that heaven is hell - and hell heaven. The greater the lie, the more readily it will be believed.

We need to be aware of all different forms of brainwashing and radicalization.

The most effective way to close down the human mind and to manipulate its sense of self is to program into it some form of dogma. A dogma will always vehemently defend itself from other information and repel any alternative opinion which contradicts its narrow, solidified view. Dogmas become a person's sense of security and means of retaining power, and humanity tends to cling to both until its knuckles turn white. Dogmas take endless forms, and when you can persuade different people to hold opposing dogmas, the manipulation of conflict and control through "divide and rule" becomes easy.

The technique of a mass movement aims to infect people with a malady and then offer the movement as a cure.

Anyone who can appease a man's conscience can take his freedom away from him.

Propaganda tries to force a doctrine on the whole people; the [party] organization embraces within its scope only those who do not threaten on psychological grounds to become a brake on the further dissemination of ideas.

Television is by nature the dominator drug par excellence. Control of content, uniformity of content, repeatability of content make it inevitably a tool of coersion, brainwashing, and manipulation.

Americans did not acquire their fear neurosis as the result of a traumatic experience - war devasting their country, pestilence sweeping the land, famine wiping out helpless millions. Americans had to be taught to hate and fear an unseen enemy. The teachers were men in official positions, in government, men whom Americans normally trust without question.

Propaganda must not concern itself with what is best in man - the highest goals humanity sets for itself, its noblest and most precious feelings. Propaganda does not aim to elevate man, but to make him serve. It must therefore utilize the most common feelings, the most widespread ideas, the crudest patterns, and in so doing place itself on a very low level with regard to what it wants man to do and to what end. Hate, hunger, and pride make better levers of propaganda than do love or impartiality.

It's a big culture of mind control too, MK-Ultra mind control rules in Hollywood. If you don't know that, google it and look into it. It's really hard for artists to find their voice in the media. It's levels of brainwashing and mind control.

This is the secret of propaganda: Those who are to be persuaded by it should be completely immersed in the ideas of the propaganda, without ever noticing that they are being immersed in it.

I listened to Hillary [Clinton], and I heard the double talk. She's so good at it, and I'm not making this up, that the Communist Chinese have sent their cadres to study her speeches. They say she's the finest propagandist they've ever heard.