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.

I started with the belief that every person who came to the laboratory was free to accept or to reject the dictates of authority. This view sustains a conception of human dignity insofar as it sees in each man a capacity for choosing his own behavior. And as it turned out, many subjects did, indeed, choose to reject the experimenter's commands, providing a powerful affirmation of human ideals.

But the culture has failed, almost entirely, in inculcating internal controls on actions that have their origin in authority. For this reason, the latter constitutes a far greater danger to human survival.

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

And perhaps our awareness is the first step to our liberation.

It is easy to ignore responsibility when one is only an intermediate link in a chain of action.