Quotes About Shame

Most psychopaths are not violent (although most serial murderers and serial rapists are psychopaths). They are people, mostly men, who have no moral emotions, no attachment systems, and no concerns for others.5 Because they feel no shame, embarrassment, or guilt, they find it easy to manipulate people into giving them money, sex, and trust.

There's the unusual stuff that psychopaths do—impulsive antisocial behavior, beginning in childhood—and there are the moral emotions that psychopaths lack. They feel no compassion, guilt, shame, or even embarrassment, which makes it easy for them to lie, and to hurt family, friends, and animals.

Angry gods make shame more effective as a means of social control.

Millon et al. 1998. Psychopaths often care what others think, but only as part of a plan to manipulate or exploit others. They don't have emotions such as shame and guilt that make it painful for them when others see through their lies and come to hate them. They don't have an automatic unconscious sociometer.

This is one reason social media has been so transformative: there is always an audience eager to watch people being shamed, particularly when it is so easy for spectators to join in and pile on. Life in a call-out culture requires constant vigilance, fear, and self-censorship.

Sometimes shame is a more powerful engine than rage.

But sometimes shame is a more powerful engine than rage. Like rage, it burns hot; and like rage it tends to consume its own furnace.

Nice to know I'm among friends...Shame none of 'em are mine.

Guilt loves the passive.

People feel if they're not achieving all they could, they're inherently flawed," said Coleman. "Shame in general causes people to withdraw and shut down.

He took aim at the core of American culture, the vast universe of people who imagined themselves to be decent but never dwelled on the shame of American racism.

Her behaviour became a model. Not surprisingly, the rabbis inferred from her conduct a strong moral rule: "It is better that a person throw himself into a fiery furnace rather than shame his neighbour in public."[4] This acute sensitivity to humiliation displayed by Tamar permeates much of Rabbinic thought:

I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed.

It's an absurd request. Our minds, unedited by guilt or shame, are selfish and unkind, and the majority of our thoughts, at any given time, are not for public consumption, because they would either be hurtful or else just make us look like the selfish and unkind bastards we are.

People who have the capacity to ruthlessly maltreat their children tend toward self-justification, not shame.

Now that he's gone, I feel like I'm a senior citizen who gave away her life savings over the phone. And this is the crux: I never in my life believed in someone as much as I believed in him. The shame is overwhelming.

Di norma una bugia serve a nascondere una verità, magari qualcosa di vergognoso, ma reale. La sua non nascondeva nulla. Sotto il falso dottor Romand non c'era un vero Jean-Claude Romand.

Soy uno de esos lectores tan bulímicos que se avergüenzan de ello y acogen con alegría cualquier motivo honorable, profesional, por ejemplo, para saciar su vicio

Una mentira, normalmente, sirve para encubrir una verdad, algo vergonzoso, quizá, pero real.

No era un héroe, sino un hombre que se avergonzaba de haber desistido de continuar siendo lo que en su momento había sido: un odiador profundo de la grandeza, de esa obligación de tener que ser alguien en la vida, un odiador del poder. Un amante de los escritores de rostros secretos y de la discreción en la literatura.

When human beings are ill, they often make a show of their injuries and parade them so that others may see and give them sympathy. It is just the reverse with an animal living in its natural state. Asking no sympathy, deeming rather that weakness of any kind is something to be ashamed of, it crawls away into some hidden corner and there, alone, it awaits the outcome – either recovery or death.

Hitler presented himself as a man of moderation and peace, as someone devoted to the German people, and as someone who publicly claimed to be following "God's will." He promised to lead Germany out of the economic hell into which it had fallen, and to lift the deep shame that Germans felt at having lost the First World War.

If our production process is so fragile that you can break it on your very first day of work, shame on us for making it so easy to do so.

If she were alive today, she would be ashamed of me. I'm trying to change that.