Martha Stout Quotes
Sociopaths love power. They love winning. If you take loving kindness out of the human brain, there's not much left except the will to win.
The most reliable sign, the most universal behavior of unscrupulous people is not directed, as one might imagine, at our fearfulness. It is, perversely, an appeal to our sympathy.
Sociopaths are just like everybody else in that some of them are really brilliant, some of them are really stupid, and most of them are somewhere in between.
If courage is acting according to one's conscience despite pain or fear, then strength is the ability to keep conscience awake and in force despite the demands of authorities to do otherwise.
Sociopathy is the inability to process emotional experience, including love and caring, except when such experience can be calculated as a coldly intellectual task.
The ultimate manipulation is to kill someone, and sociopathy is murderous in a psychological sense - there's a kind of soul-murder going on.
Most of who we are is our deepest emotions, and someone who cannot feel those emotions in a positive way is never going to understand much about his fellow human beings.
Even famous people - are most concerned of all with what people who are close to them think. And the sociopath is generally not concerned with that at all.
Sociopaths are not afraid of very much, except for physical harm and dying - really primitive, basic kinds of fears. The problem with being alone for a sociopath is boredom.
I am not allowed by my profession to diagnose somebody from a distance, but one can observe certain symptoms of sociopathy in George W. Bush.
Conscience- protects the privileges of intimacy, makes, friends keep their promises, prevents the angered spouse from striking back.