Garrison Keillor Quotes

We want to believe we are good, we are different, we are better, or we are superior. But this body of social-psychological research--and there are obviously many more experiments in addition to mine and Milgram's--shows that the majority of good, ordinary, normal people can be easily seduced, tempted, or initiated into behaving in ways that they say they never would. In 30 minutes we got them stepping across that line.

You'd just be amazed what people will do. You really would. And not crazy people. Ostensibly normal people. When the right person touches the right button in someone, you can get them to do almost anything.

When you stop people from doing certain things, there is a good chance that they will do exactly what they have been told to abjure. That is how human nature is.

If you know a little bit the psychology of human beings, you have to understand that if you say something you should not do, then everybody wants to do it.

Conformity is the ape of harmony.

In all the dictatorships, there's such a non-understanding of what human beings are. I mean, if you believe in the Bible, you have the story of Adam and Eve and God tells them, "Do whatever you want. The only thing you shouldn't do is eat the apple." What do they do the first thing? They eat the apple. So if you know a little bit the psychology of human beings, you have to understand that if you say something you should not do, then everybody wants to do it.

Conformity is an imitation of grace.

People are submissive to power, and few of them can be influenced by doctrines of righteousness.

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.

I want to make a revolving door that says 'Pull' on it, just see how obedient people are.

Rules equal boredom, and I don't like that.

The more things are forbidden, the more popular they become.

I wasn't a good rule-breaker when I was younger.

Most men, after a little freedom, have preferred authority with the consoling assurances and the economy of effort it brings.

None of us is immune to suggestion. We are social beings and live in a social world.

You know what it's like to persuade a pigheaded child to do something they don't want to. If they hear the same suggestion from someone else, they'll go right off and do it.

Rules are mostly made to be broken and are too often for the lazy to hide behind.

It is necessary to distinguish between the virtue and the vice of obedience.

Conformity--the natural instinct to passively yield to that vague something recognized as authority.

The young always have the same problem – how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their parents and copying one another.

Given appropriate social conditions, decent, ordinary people can be led to do extraordinarily cruel things.

I've never really been a rebellious teen.

When we find ourselves in groups or with charismatic individuals, we might do things we wouldn't ordinarily do.

The voice of authority speaks not for the one but for the many; authority figures have a strong and rapid effect on social norms in part because they change our assumptions about what other people think.

I don't take well to rules.