Martha Stout Quotes

I am sure that if the devil existed, he would want us to feel very sorry for him.

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 central trait of sociopathy is a complete lack of conscience, which is very difficult for most people to get their heads around, because those of us who do have a conscience can't really imagine what it would be like if we didn't. Most people think that deep down everybody has a conscience, and it turns out that's just not true.

The perfect victim, from the sociopath's point of view, is the person who is smart enough and capable enough to do him some good in the world and who is also fun to manipulate. How much fun is it to manipulate someone who is stupid and incompetent?

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.

A part of a healthy conscience is being able to confront consciencelessness. When you teach your daughter, explicitly or by passive rejection, that she must ignore her outrage, that she must be kind and accepting to the point of not defending herself or other people, that she must not rock the boat for any reason, you are NOT strengthening her posocial sense, you are damaging it-and the first person she will stop protecting is herself.

If you don't have a conscience, what is your behavior like? Apparently, if you don't have a conscience, if you don't really . . . love, then the only thing that's left for you is the game - it's about controlling things.

Sociopaths are often extremely charming. They are people who are better than you and me at charming people, at being charismatic. I've heard this more often than I can count: "He was the most charming man I ever met," or, "She was the sexiest woman I ever met," or, "The most interesting person I ever met . . ."

The sociopath wants the person to be easily enough fooled to stick with him. This can be accomplished by looking for someone who is very, very loyal. Most of us consider loyalty to be a very positive trait - and it is a positive trait. But it also blinds people to some of the traits of the person they're loyal to.

In Western culture, particularly North America, a lot of rules are descriptors for sociopathy: a general acceptance of lying as long as you win, an attitude of "me first," an attitude that what it looks like is more important than what it is. This makes it much easier for a sociopath to be camouflaged in our culture.

One way or another, a life without conscience is a failed life.

I saw a werewolf drinking a pina colada at Trader Vic's. His hair was perfect.

Sociopaths are not inhibited by the notion that it's wrong to be addicted, or wrong to buy illegal drugs. Also, drinking or taking drugs can be a lot of fun, and even if it's not, it can dull that painful boredom for a while. So can certain other things, like taking risks, and particularly if you take a risk-averse person and you can manipulate him or her into taking risks, that's really fun.

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.

People ask me many times, "Aren't you afraid you're going to scare people? Aren't you afraid you're going to make people feel bad about the human race?" I look at it as entirely the opposite. Something you can understand and identify should be less frightening than something you can't. And to understand that there are people who are capable of acting without conscience, without considering other people at all, explains a lot of things.

Being sociopath is not what most people would consider to be winning. Most of us have some kind of positive goal in mind when we think of winning. A sociopath thinks in terms of successfully manipulating someone into doing something that he or she would not have done otherwise. That can be a small thing or a tremendous thing, but the point for the sociopath is to win, to make sure that this person does what they're trying to coerce him or her into doing. It can be as disgusting and as simple as making a child cry. Or it can be as complex as making your wife feel bad about herself.

The reason I want to explain that you're probably never going to get revenge a sociopath and you're also probably not going to redeem this person, is that it is not a project that will ever succeed. At present, if a person does not have a conscience, we know of no way to instill one - not even a little bit. It's not like something you can take off the shelf and put into somebody's brain. It makes me so sad to hear people say, "I think I can see just a little bit of a conscience."

In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.

Sociopathy is the inability to process emotional experience, including love and caring, except when such experience can be calculated as a coldly intellectual task.

An intelligent sociopath can learn the rules about what's good and what's bad, what people see as good and bad. But they don't get that intervening sense of guilt, that pang of conscience, on account of it. So they tend to know what's wrong or right, they just don't care. That's another thing that they can use against us: that we do care. We're predictable in that.

Sociopaths are not usually physically violent. A typical sociopath never kills anybody and doesn't look like Charles Manson - they look like you and me and everybody else. You're not looking for someone who's recognizably evil or scary-looking, but rather someone who looks normal. Another lynchpin is dishonesty. Lying for the sake of lying. Lying just to see whether you can trick people. And sometimes telling larger lies to get larger effects.

Conscience is the still small voice that has been trying since the infancy of our species to tell us that we are evolutionarily, emotionally, and spiritually One, and that if we seek peace and happiness, we must behave that way.

If you see somebody really pulling for your sympathy while at the same time hurting you intermittently, you should start to wonder. If somebody plays to your pity and really tries to draw that out of you, that's not normal.

The bottom line for most people who are normal is their need for other people. Even the greedy ones have this need - as long as they're not sociopathic. They may be very misguided and unhappy and do bad things and so forth, but in general if you look down deep, you find that these people are mainly concerned with other people and what other people think of them.

I was once doing a book signing and a man came up to me and said that he gave classes to people who'd been convicted of drunken driving twice. He said he felt that nearly all of those people were what I was describing as sociopathic. Which makes a great deal of sense to me. We always talk about how could you possibly, knowing that you're drunk, get behind the wheel of a car again and do that? Well, you could if you didn't give a half a damn what happened.