Bill Dedman Quotes

My grandfather was a police officer. He taught Dad about lie detectors and police interrogation methods, so Dad got this old World War II lie detector and used it on us regularly. He was obsessed with the truth.

Because interrogations are intended to coerce confessions, interrogators feel themselves justified in using their coercive means. Consistency regarding the technique is not important; inducing anxiety and fear is the point.

The U.S. is, so far as I know, the only nation which places such extensive reliance on the polygraph. It has gotten us into a lot of trouble.

Many criminals believe what they say is true; they could pass a lie detector test.

I have never worked on interrogation; I have never seen an interrogation, and I have only a passing knowledge of the literature on interrogation. With that qualification, my opinion is that the point of interrogation is to get at the truth, not to get at what the interrogator wants to hear.

Confessions are not processed or analysed; they're told in a moment of desperation to a priest or to somebody interrogating you about a crime.

A good lie detector doesn't jump to conclusions but tries to understand the person across the table, her personality, and her motivations. Your goal as a lie spotter isn't to point the finger and say, 'You're lying' - your goal is to get to the truth.

Humans are startlingly bad at detecting fraud. Even when we're on the lookout for signs of deception, studies show, our accuracy is hardly better than chance.

At the secret CIA training facility called 'The Farm,' aspiring case-officers learn how to recruit spies and steal secrets. As a former CIA officer, this is where I was taught that in order to successfully recruit an asset, I must first understand what would motivate an individual to cooperate with the CIA in the first place.

For the liespotter who knows how to listen well, the random words, sounds, and phrases in a person's speech are never as random as they seem. They offer a clear sightline into the liar's psyche.

I like to push people till I get the truth out of them. Get them drunk, or whatever. Then discover what they really think. Push them and push them and push them.

The one thing we know about torture is that it was never designed in the first place to get at the actual truth of anything; it was designed in the darkest days of human history to produce false confessions in order to annihilate political and religious dissidents. And that is how it always works: it gets confessions regardless of their accuracy.

And even a liar can be scared into telling the truth, same as honest man can be tortured into telling a lie.

It would be a stultification of the responsibility which the course of constitutional history has cast upon this Court to hold that in order to convict a man the police cannot extract by force what is in his mind, but can extract what is in his stomach.

Juilin," she asked hesitantly, "what were you going to do with the salt and cooking oil? Not exactly," she added more quickly. "Just a general idea." He looked at her for a moment. "I do not know. But they did not, either. That is the trick of it; their minds made up worse then I ever could. I have seen a tough man break when I sent for a basket of figs and some mice.

A woman questions the man who loves exactly as a judge questions a criminal. This being so, a flash of the eye, a mere word, an inflection of the voice or a moment's hesitation suffice to expose the fact, betrayal or crime he is attempting to conceal.

Adrian!You Used compulsion on that guy. That.... I mean, it's....." "Awesome?Yeah,I Know

The more I accuse myself, the more right I have to judge you. Even better, I make you judge yourself, which comforts me the more.

I want to take back at least half of the “I love you”s, because I didn’t mean them as much as the other ones.

You can't accuse me of anything I haven't already confessed to.

I was bullied by my siblings and cousins, so make-believe was a way in which I could be in charge. When I was like 10 and my sister was about five, I convinced her that she was going to jail because she used a bad word. The doorbell happened to ring, and I told her it was the police. I made her pack her bags. She was crying, and then I said to her, "I forgive you, and I'm gonna tell the cop to go away." Then, of course, she loved me. It was terrible - she still remembers it. I had a sordid sense of humor.

If we suspect that a man is lying, we should pretend to believe him; for then he becomes bold and assured, lies more vigorously, and is unmasked.

Anxiety and conscience are a powerful pair of dynamos. Between them, they have ensured that I shall work hard, but they cannot ensure that one shall work at anything worthwhile.

In religion, the ego manifests as the devil. And of course, no one realizes how smart the ego is because it created the devil so you could blame someone else.

Responsibilites and expectations are the basis of guilt and shame and judgement, and they provide the essential framework that promotes performance as the basis for identity and value.