Joss Whedon Quotes

We are all in a post-hypnotic trance induced in early infancy.

Remembering. Forgetting. I'm not sure which is worse.

I don't know their names. Their names have been erased from my memory banks. If I tried to bring 'em back, I'd get shocked.

In 2006, when doing a live stage show in Ireland, I tried for the first time to instantly induct a subject on stage, something I had never done before, nor did I know if it would ever work. The result almost cost me my career; the man I grabbed and instantly inducted went out cold and fell to the floor.

I can't manipulate anybody's minds.

I see the 'z' in 'Humanz' as referring to robots, AI, programming, brainwashing, indoctrination. And it's a question to us: are we human, or are we humanz? Have we lost the ability to think for ourselves? Do we just believe what we're told? That's how I see it.

I mixed hypnosis and magic together to try and create a new area. I'm not trying to reinvent the wheel.

There's a lot of different styles of hypnosis. There's conversational hypnosis, which, even though we joke about it, politicians use conversational hypnosis. I've been hired back at home in Ireland by certain politicians to assist them in specific language patterns that will just tip people over into their, you know, into their zone.

I am constantly asked can anyone be hypnotized, and does it really work? Yes, and it does.

Once you've hypnotised someone once, you can pretty much put them under instantly any time you meet them afterwards.

I got hurt when I was 19. They thought I broke my neck. I couldn't move my hands or feet, and I had a very bad experience.

I first read about hypnotism at school, and I used to do tricks like getting a really skinny guy to arm wrestle the local bully.

I feel like even if I was to, say, trip and fall over on the way to the car and scratch all my arm, by the time I got in the car, it would be blacked out in my head.

You have to realise that hypnosis doesn't exist: it just works on people's natural suggestibility, their expectations and capacity to unconsciously role play. You can't make someone do anything they don't want to do.

I was in Leeds, just starting out, and I was hypnotising one person up on stage. Suddenly I had members of the crowd unsuspectingly go to sleep on me as well.

I was attracted to the comics because of the characters and, particularly, Wolverine because he is so complex. He is so damaged and tragic in many ways - he doesn't have his memory. His body was invaded. He has unrequited love for Jean Grey.

Hypnosis is just suggestibility; you see it in certain people.

Clearly if a hypnotist could make someone to steal £100k just by telling them to, the world would be a different place, and I suspect that hypnotists wouldn't bother doing shows in pubs or dodgy Spanish holiday resorts.

Forget that I remember And dream that I forget.

Man has got to take charge of Man.... Then real education, including pre-natal education. By real education I mean one that has no 'take-it-or-leave-it' nonsense. A real education makes the patient what it wants infallibly: whatever he or his parents try to do about it. Of course, it'll have to be mainly psychological at first. But we'll get on to biochemical conditioning int he end and direct manipulation of the brain.

In the way that women forget the pain of childbirth, men forget that they cry in movies.

A mind virus is different in that there is no form to it; these are ideas placed in our heads when we are little. We get programmed by well-meaning people like our parents and their parents, our culture, religions and schools. We get conditioned to believe in our limitations and what's not possible.

It's not enough to bash in heads. You've got to bash in minds.

The brain controls pain. It controls fear. Sleep. Empathy. Hunger. Everything we associate with the heart or the soul or the nervous system is actually controlled by the brain. Everything. What if you could control it?

I don't remember going to bed, but in the morning, there I was.