Top 90 Philip Zimbardo Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Many cults start off with high ideals that get corrupted by leaders or their board of advisors who become power-hungry and dominate and control members lives. No group with high ideals starts off as a cult; they become one when their errant ways are exposed.”

— Philip Zimbardo

52. “While no one can change events that occurred in the past, everyone can change attitudes and beliefs about them.”

— Philip Zimbardo

53. “It is when power is wedded to chronic fear that it becomes formidable. – Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind.”

— Philip Zimbardo

54. “At that moment, the Stanford Prison Experiment was changed into the Stanford Prison, not by any top-down formal declarations by the staff but by this bottom-up declaration from one of the prisoners themselves.”

— Philip Zimbardo

55. “Being hurt personally triggered a curiosity about how such beliefs are formed.”

— Philip Zimbardo

56. “At North Hollywood High School, I was shunned by everyone. I would sit down in the cafeteria, and students would get up from the table and walk away. They thought I was from the Mafia.”

— Philip Zimbardo

57. “Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: “The line between good and evil is in the center of every human heart.”

— Philip Zimbardo

58. “One can’t live mindfully without being enmeshed in psychological processes that are around us.”

— Philip Zimbardo

59. “Time is the backdrop of our lives and the very fabric of the cosmos.”

— Philip Zimbardo

60. “Where can you find purpose? Like success and happiness, our purpose exists in the present, and we constantly strive toward the future to maintain it. What it is for which we strive is up to each of us. The important thing is that we strive toward something.”

— Philip Zimbardo

61. “The Devil’s strategy for our times is to trivialize human existence and isolate us from one another while creating the delusion that the reasons are time pressures, work demands or economic anxieties.”

— Philip Zimbardo

62. “A good way to avoid crimes of obedience is to assert one’s personal authority and always take full responsibility for one’s actions.23.”

— Philip Zimbardo

63. “I was discriminated against because I was Jewish, Italian, black and Puerto Rican. But maybe the worst prejudice I experienced was against the poor. I grew up on welfare and often had to move in the middle of the night because we couldn’t pay the rent.”

— Philip Zimbardo

64. “The fundamental human need to belong comes from the desire to associate with others, to cooperate, to accept group norms. However, the SPE shows that the need to belong can also be perverted into excessive conformity, compliance, and in-group versus out-group hostility. The need for autonomy and control, the central forces toward self-direction and planning, can be perverted into an excessive exercise of power to dominate others or into learned helplessness.”

— Philip Zimbardo

65. “The level of shyness has gone up dramatically in the last decade. I think shyness is an index of social pathology rather than a pathology of the individual.”

— Philip Zimbardo

66. “I started studying shyness in adults in 1972. Shyness operates at so many different levels. Out of that research came the Stanford shyness clinic in 1977.”

— Philip Zimbardo

67. “Time and oppression are the fathers of rebellious invention.”

— Philip Zimbardo

68. “Most of us fail to appreciate the extent to which our behavior is under situational control, because we prefer to believe that is all is internally generated. We wander around cloaked in an illusion of vulnerability, mis-armed with an arrogance of free will and rationality.”

— Philip Zimbardo

69. “Bad systems” create “bad situations” create “bad apples” create “bad behaviors,” even in good people.”

— Philip Zimbardo

70. “That seduction or initiation into evil can be understood by recognizing that most actors are not solitary figures improvising on the empty stage of life. Rather, they are often an ensemble of different players, on a stage with various props and changing costumes, scripts, and stage directions from producers and directors.”

— Philip Zimbardo

71. “Prejudice and discrimination have always been a big part of my life. When I was 6, I got beat up and called dirty Jew boy because they thought I looked Jewish.”

— Philip Zimbardo

72. “What troubles me is the Internet and the electronic technology revolution. Shyness is fueled in part by so many people spending huge amounts of time alone, isolated on e-mail, in chat rooms, which reduces their face-to-face contact with other people.”

— Philip Zimbardo

73. “Power said to the world, “You are mine.” The world kept it prisoner on her throne. Love said to the world, “I am thine.” The world gave it the freedom of her house. – Rabindranath Tagore, Stray Birds22.”

— Philip Zimbardo

74. “Research shows that the deciscions of a group as a whole are more thoughtful and creative when there is minority dissent than when it is absent.”

— Philip Zimbardo

75. “Companies that model best practices, that model the most upstanding principles, end up as the most profitable. It’s not a trade of profits versus principles.”

— Philip Zimbardo

76. “However, even psychologists are people, subject to the same dynamic processes at a personal level that they study at a professional level.”

— Philip Zimbardo

77. “There are no limits to what I would do to make my classes exciting, interesting, unpredictable.”

— Philip Zimbardo

78. “Careers in virtually all academic disciplines are fostered by being a superstar who knows more about one subject than anyone else in the world.”

— Philip Zimbardo

79. “While 76 per cent of Americans said they watched, read or heard the news on a daily basis, only 41 per cent said they went beyond the headlines.4 So there’s this potential illusion of knowing. It is the danger of having a superficial level of knowledge about anything, but believing you know everything.”

— Philip Zimbardo

80. “While the entire US population has increased by about a third since 1980, the federal prison population has grown at an astonishing rate – by almost 800 per cent. It’s still growing – despite the fact that federal prisons are operating at nearly 40 per cent above capacity. Even though this country comprises just 5 per cent of the world’s population, we incarcerate almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.”

— Philip Zimbardo

81. “A twisted sort of shyness has evolved as the digital self becomes less and less like the real-life operator. The ego is the playmaker; the character is the observer, as the external world shrinks to the size of Billy’s bedroom.”

— Philip Zimbardo

82. “The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.”

— Philip Zimbardo

83. “Added to my distress was the realization that many of the “independent” investigative reports clearly laid the blame for the abuses at the feet of senior officers.”

— Philip Zimbardo

84. “There is an important message here about the power of words, labels, rhetoric, and stereotyped labeling, to be used for good or evil. We need to refashion the childhood rhyme “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never harm me,” to alter the last phrase to “but bad names can kill me, and good ones can comfort me.”

— Philip Zimbardo

85. “Most of us hide behind egocentric biases that generate the illusion that we are special.”

— Philip Zimbardo

86. “Einstein himself is reported to have said: When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute and it’s longer than any hour. That’s relativity.”

— Philip Zimbardo

87. “The rationale is this: our research will attempt to differentiate between what people bring into a prison situation from what the situation brings out in the people who are there.”

— Philip Zimbardo

88. “Any deed, for good or evil, that any human being has ever done, you and I could also do – given the same situational forces.”

— Philip Zimbardo

89. “Another way of looking at it is, you’re putting good people in an evil situation to see who or what wins.”

— Philip Zimbardo

90. “Pappas was so affected by this sudden horror that he never again took off his flak jacket. It was reported to me that he always wore his jacket and hard helmet even while showering.”

— Philip Zimbardo

91. “No one played devil’s advocate, a figure that every group needs to avoid foolish or even disastrous decisions like this. It was reminiscent of President John Kennedy’s “disastrous” decision to invade Cuba in the Bay of Pigs fiasco.11.”

— Philip Zimbardo