Quotes About Psychopaths

are psychopaths. They form cults around themselves, isolate cult members from their friends and family, teach that "sexual encounters" with the leader are both an honor and an occasion for spiritual enlightenment.

In addition to psychopaths, 'Quantum Night' is also a novel about literally thoughtless people, without inner voices, thoughts in their heads.

We aren't all good people just trying to do good. Some of us are psychopaths . And psychopaths are to blame for this brutal, mis-shapen society.

I couldn't see where the collection of Burger King figurines fit in, but I supposed there was no reason why psychopaths shouldn't have unrelated hobbies.

But surely stock-market psychopaths can't be as bad as serial-killer psychopaths,' I said. 'Serial killers ruin families,' shrugged Bob. 'Corporate and political and religious psychopaths ruin economies. They ruin societies.

The killer's name was Michael Stone and he was a known psychopath. He had previous convictions. But the law stated that only patients whose mental disorders were considered treatable could be detained beyond their prison sentences. Psychopaths were considered untreatable and so Michael Stone had to be free.

You're standing on an escalator and you're watching the people go past on the opposite escalator. If you could climb inside their brains you would see we aren't all the same. We aren't all good people just trying to do good. Some of us are psychopaths. And psychopaths are to blame for this brutal, misshapen society. They're the rocks thrown into the still pond.

Justice departments and parole boards all over the world have accepted his contention that psychopaths are quite simply incurable and everyone should concentrate their energies instead on learning how to root them out using his PCL-R Checklist, which he has spent a lifetime refining. His was not the only psychopath checklist around, but it was by far the most extensively used.

I vaguely remembered hearing psychologists say there was a preponderance of psychopaths at the top—in the corporate and political worlds—a clinical absence of empathy being a benefit in those environments.

He did another experiment, the Startle Reflex Test, in which psychopaths and non-psychopaths were invited to look at grotesque images, like crime-scene photographs of blown-apart faces, and then when they least expected it, Bob would let off an incredibly loud noise in their ear. The non-psychopaths would leap with astonishment. The psychopaths would remain comparatively serene. Bob

He blamed psychopaths for the brutal excesses of capitalism itself, that the system at its cruelest was a manifestation of a few people's anomalous amygdalae.

This—Bob was saying—was the straightforward solution to the greatest mystery of all: Why is the world so unfair? Why all that savage economic injustice, those brutal wars, the everyday corporate cruelty? The answer: psychopaths.

I remembered those psychologists who said psychopaths made the world go around. They meant it: society was, they claimed, an expression of that particular sort of madness.

Psychopaths don't change, she [Essi Viding] said. They don't learn from punishment. The best you can hope for is that they'll eventually get too old and lazy to be bothered to offend. And they can seem impressive. Charismatic. People are dazzled. So, yeah, the real trouble starts when one makes it big in mainstream society.

a preponderance of psychopaths at the top, in the corporate and political worlds – a clinical absence of empathy being a benefit in those environments.

Why is the world so unfair? Why all that savage economic injustice, those brutal wars, the everyday corporate cruelty? The answer: psychopaths. That part of the brain that doesn't function right.

He said I really had to be careful. Psychopaths are truly dangerous, he said. And they're often the people you least expect them to be. "When

Whereas most people automatically anticipate the consequences of their actions, automatically feel shame for unkind deeds, automatically understand why they should persist in the face of frustration, automatically distrust propositions that seem too good to be true, and are automatically aware of their commitments to others, psychopaths may only become aware of such factors with effort.

Human beings are disgustingly predictable, and this is as true of psychopaths as it is of grandmothers.

All power structures, by their very nature, eventually get taken over by psychopaths. Almost all governments in the world have been taken over by gifted psychopaths who have a great command of human psychology and use normal people to their advantage. This race of pathological deviants can't feel compassion, they have no conscience. They have an insatiable need for power—and they rule the world.

Morality is often seen as an innovation, like agriculture and writing. From this perspective, babies are pint-sized psychopaths, self-interested beings who need to be taught moral notions such as the wrongness of harming another person.

Psychopaths are social predators, and like all predators, they are looking for feeding grounds. Wherever you get power, prestige and money, you will find them.

For among the many things that warfare does is temporarily define the entire enemy population as superfluous, as expendable—a redefinition that must take place before most non-psychopaths can massacre innocent people and remain shielded from self-condemnation. And nothing is more helpful to that political and psychological transformation than the availability of a deep well of national and cultural consciousness that consigns whole categories of people to the distant outback of humanity.

But the world had gone mad, in his opinion. Lies and stupidity were more widespread than ever before. Demagogues and psychopaths dominated the political scene, and prejudice and intolerance were poisoning everything, sometimes even penetrating the discussions within his own, otherwise sensible team.