...I offended some of you by saying you had been brainwashed. This is not an insult; it's a simple statement of fact. When any infant is born and socialized in a society, even if he is to become a very mature individual, he has been brainwashed. ...given a structure for categorizing his experience and a system of values applied to the structure of categories.

Ideological brainwashing constitutes the essence and foundation of the formation of the Soviet man. […]. As part of ideological training, people learn to “correctly” interpret the phenomena that they are comforted with in their lives. […] This is not a question of stupidity. The ideological man thus trained does not become stupid. rather, it is the opposite effect that takes place. p. 638

The easiest way to get brainwashed is to be born. All of the above principles then immediately go into action, a process which social psychologists euphemistically call socialization.

What Women's Lib might achieve if their 'consciousness raising' - or in plain English, brainwashing — campaign succeeds is a society whose members have identical roles but are perpetually at war with themselves; a society of males made neurotic by suppressed masculinity, of females made miserable by having masculine roles thrust upon them that contradict their feminine impulses.

The brainwashing which has been going on for 150 years has also resulted in the replacement of intellectual activities and religion by ideologies and science. ...I have nothing against Marx, except that his theories do not explain what happened.

Many of the smartest people and most creative talents are working for the brainwashers, using dazzling images, sex and violence to rob us of our sanity.

We are all of us, to some degree or another, brainwashed by the society we live in. We are able to see this when we travel to another country, and are able to catch a glimpse of our own country with foreign eyes.. the best we can hope for is that a kindly friend from another culture will enable us to look at our culture with dispassionate eyes.

I have one thing against medical technology. You see, the very desire to understand the human being is to control him — that is why I am not quite in sympathy. The day you control the endocrine glands, you will change the personality of man; you won't need any brainwashing. Brainwashing is a very elaborate process. If nature had been allowed to go on in its own way, everybody would have become a unique flower. Why should there be only roses in this world? What for? A grass flower or a dandelion flower has as much beauty, as much importance in the scheme of things. Why should there be only jasmine flowers, roses, or some other flower? So, the possibility is there of a change taking place which is sudden, not progressive. It has to happen in a very sudden and explosive way to break the whole thing.

Human society as a whole is a vast brainwashing machine whose semantic rules and sex roles create a social robot.

The conformist is not born. He is made. I believe the brainwashing process begins in the schools and colleges.

Human beings have an inalienable right to invent themselves; when that right is pre-empted it is called brain-washing.

Negroes in Mississippi are being “hood winked” and “cow licked” into believing that everything is well with his condition here in the state. State and national officials are engaging in an extensive brainwashing campaign to induce the Mississippi Negro to remain silent and complacent about the rights he is now being denied. Evidence of these brainwashing techniques is found in the every day attempt on the part of some jurist or politician who praises the “so called harmonious race relations,” that exist in the state, and at the same time deny Negroes, regardless to their educational qualification, the right to register and vote.

Do you know how they brainwash people? They repeat something over and over. And that's what we do in this country. Owning things is good. More money is good. More property is good. More commercialism is good. More is good. More is good. We repeat it — and have it repeated to us — over and over until nobody bothers to even think otherwise. The average person is so fogged up by all this, he has no perspective on what's really important anymore.

So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about as numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state.