Brainwashing Quotes

“People who work with victims of cults, for example, often observe that the new beliefs are associated with extremely emotional states. Challenging such a belief rationally is difficult if not impossible. The victim not only perceives any such challenge as hostile but refuses to engage in rational debate; the”
― Kathleen Taylor, Brainwashing: The Science of Thought Control

“Loading the language is the mind-numbing process by which ‘the most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive- sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed’, whose aim is to shut down independent thinking.”
― Kathleen Taylor, Brainwashing: The Science of Thought Control

“Human beings have been trying to change each others' minds since they first discovered they had them.”
― Kathleen Taylor, Brainwashing: The Science of Thought Control

“Milieu control is the attempt to dominate ‘not only the individual’s communication with the outside (all that he sees and hears, reads and writes, experiences, and expresses), but also—in its penetration of his inner life—over what we may speak of as his communication with himself”
― Kathleen Taylor, Brainwashing: The Science of Thought Control

“Brainwashing is more ambitious, and more coercive, than simple persuasion, and unlike older cognates such as indoctrination, it has become closely associated with modern, mechanistic technology. It is a systematic processing of non- compliant human beings which, if successful, refashions their very identities.”
― Kathleen Taylor, Brainwashing: The Science of Thought Control

“Although it is arguable that the major world religions began as cults, most have become so institutionalized that they have lost many of their cultic features.”
― Kathleen Taylor, Brainwashing: The Science of Thought Control

“There are some phenomena commonly found in both cults and religions (at least in their early days). These include a strict differentiation of leader and followers; rebellion against established authority; paranoia as the new movement seeks to establish itself; simplistic, dualistic thinking [...] (good/evil, believer/heretic, saved/damned); and a tendency towards utopian thinking.”
― Kathleen Taylor, Brainwashing: The Science of Thought Control

“Robert Lifton’s eight totalist themes”
― Kathleen Taylor, Brainwashing: The Science of Thought Control

“Although force is often used, it is not essential. Many cults woo their victims with love, rather than brutality.”
― Kathleen Taylor, Brainwashing: The Science of Thought Control

“Cult followers typically consider their leaders divine or, at least, mandated by some supreme authority (God, fate, the forces of history, or whatever ethereal idea fits their particular world view) to change the universe.”
― Kathleen Taylor, Brainwashing: The Science of Thought Control

“Many followers tend to join in their teens or early twenties, when they are still unformed adults—individuals not yet fully at ease in their own skins, seeking a sense of identity and security which the cult is able to provide.”
― Kathleen Taylor, Brainwashing: The Science of Thought Control

“Brainwashing investigates a number of domains: religion, politics, advertising and the media, education, mental health, the military, the criminal justice system, domestic violence, and torture.”
― Kathleen Taylor, Brainwashing: The Science of Thought Control