Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.

For a person to feel responsible for his actions, he must sense that the behavior has flowed from the self.

Only in action can you fully realize the forces operative in social behavior. That is why I am an experimentalist.

It is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act.

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.

Even Eichmann was sickened when he toured the concentration camps.

The soldier does not wish to appear a coward, disloyal, or un-American. The situation has been so defined that he can see himself as patriotic, courageous, and manly only through compliance.