The Manchurian Candidate

by Richard Condon

These were the people who let a war start, then they act surprised when their own son is killed.

Raymond also distrusted all other living people because they had not warned his father of his mother.

The shell of armor that encased Raymond, by the horrid tracery of its design, presented him as one of the least likeable men of his century.

He had been told who he was only by his whimpering unconscious mind: a motherless (by choice), fatherless (by treachery), friendless (by circumstance), and joyless (by consequence) man who would continue to refuse emphatically to live and who, autocratically and unequivocally, did not intend to die.

Conditioning, called brainwashing by the news agencies, is the production of reactions in the human organism through the use of associative reflexes.

The first thing a human being is loyal to, Yen Lo observed, is his own conditioned nervous system.

The conception of people acting against their own best interests should not startle us. We see it occasionally in sleepwalking and in politics, every day.”