Only on page 24 of this 470+ page book (small type) so it's going to take awhile. Already he's summarized the Abu Gharib prison, the Inquisition and Witch trials and psychological reasons for using rape as a weapon during the Hutu's machete massacre of the Tutsis in Rwanda. My favourite quote so far comes from the 'Notes' from Chapter 1:
The psychologist Robert Jay Lifton, author of The Nazi Doctors, argues that rape is often a deliberate tool of war to set into motion continuous suffering and extreme humiliation that will affect not just the individual victim but also everyone around her. "A woman is seen as a symbol of purity. The family revolves around that symbol. Then there is the brutal attack on that, stigmatizing them all. All this perpetuates the humiliation, reverberating among survivors and their whole families. In this way, rape is worse than death."
My other favourite quote, so far, concerns the Witch Trials:
The terrible paradox of the Inquisition is that the ardent and often sincere desire to combat evil generated evil on a grander scale than the world had ever seen before.
Zimbardo was responsible for the famous (or infamous?) Stanford Prison Experiment that randomly assigned college students to be either a guard or prisoner. The guards became capable of inflicting extreme humiliation on the prisoners so quickly that the experiment was halted prematurely. Zimbardo discovered just how easily evil can oversome us. I'm just starting the chapters which details this experiment.
Here's the link to his presentation at TED that prompted me to read his book:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/philip_zimbardo_on_the_psychology_of_evil.html
