Robert Jay Lifton Quotes

1. “I learned a lot from Vietnam veterans, especially as some of them turned against their own war.”

2. “And I thought about the psychic numbing involved in strategic projections of using hydrogen bombs or nuclear weapons of any kind. And I also thought about ways in which all of us undergo what could be called the numbing of everyday life.”

3. “Sometimes it's said that psychiatrists are doctors who are frightened by the sight of blood. I might have fallen into that category.”

4. “I'm a Brooklyn boy. I was born in Brooklyn, New York, and raised there, and spent most of my childhood there.”

5. “I don't have the feeling that as a very young person I read books that absolutely made their mark on my mind.”

6. “As a kid I was fascinated with sports, and I loved sports more than anything else. The first books I read were about sports, like books about Baseball Joe, as one baseball hero was called.”

7. “Again, I was influenced by my father, who was very much an atheist and took pride in combating the traditional or orthodox forms of Judaism, which his parents and which my mother's parents were very steeped in.”

8. “But I spent just two calendar years at Cornell University, though it was covering more than three years of work, and then went to medical school and did become interested in psychiatry, and even helped form a kind of psychiatry club in medical school.”

9. “I never quite envisioned myself a proper doctor under that white coat, but I was interested in the idea of healing and in the psychological dimension rather early on.”

10. “When I was still in my psychiatric residency training in New York City, I was subjected to the doctor draft of that time, during the early fifties, at the time of the Korean War.”