Top 100 Quotes About Psychopaths
#1. That's what they do, psychopaths. They figure out your language, your currency, your needs, your dreams and fears. Then they figure out how to use those things to get what they want from you. Most
Lisa Unger
#2. One of the problems with studies that examine the effects of violent imagery is that they typically use mentally healthy psychology students. If you want to do a meaningful study, show movies like Body Double and Copycat to a group of sexual psychopaths the day before you release them.
Park Dietz
#3. Human beings are disgustingly predictable, and this is as true of psychopaths as it is of grandmothers.
Douglas Preston
#4. It is easy to romanticise, say, tigers or lions and cats. We admire their magnificent beauty, strength and agility. But we would regard their notional human counterparts as wanton psychopaths of the worst kind.
David Pearce
#5. If I have a mission in life, it is to convince people that everyone is morally motivated - everyone except for psychopaths.
Jonathan Haidt
#6. Same. I don't like to think I might have ended up in Plumber's gang, but given the alternative..."
I raised both eyebrows. "Yeah. Drug-dealers or super-powered psychopaths? Choices, choices.
Violet Cross
#7. Theta waves are associated with drowsy, meditative, or sleeping states. Yet in psychopaths, they occur during normal waking states, even sometimes during states of increased arousal.
Kevin Dutton
#8. When it comes to psychopaths, there is no medication. There is no treatment. There is no cure. There are only prisons. - JENI GREGORY, PHD, LICSW, CCM, CCTP
Robert Dugoni
#9. In regular circumstances, 60 percent of criminal psychopaths released into the outside world go on to re-offend. What percentage of their psychopaths had? As it turned out: 80 percent. The Capsule had made the psychopaths worse.
Jon Ronson
#10. It's the doom of our species that psychopaths always want to be in charge.
Linda Nagata
#11. It is the cult of self that is killing the United States. This cult has within it the classic traits of psychopaths: superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance ; a need for constant stimulation; a penchant for lying, deception and manipulation; and the incapacity for remorse or guilt.
Chris Hedges
#12. One of the problems with religion is that it creates in-group loyalty and out-group hostility, even when members of one's own group are behaving like psychopaths.
Sam Harris
#13. All the reading in the world cannot immunize you from the devastating effects of psychopaths. Everyone, including the experts, can be taken in, conned, and left bewildered by them. A good psychopath can play a concerto on anyone's heart strings.
Robert D. Hare
#14. 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.
Robert D. Hare
#15. Psychopaths are odd and rare and unique by themself... if they were writers, I bet in one that they will be the best...
Deyth Banger
#16. I always said that if I wasn't studying psychopaths in prison, I'd do it at the stock exchange.
Robert D. Hare
#17. Sex murders were usually the work of psychopaths and with that psychology was an innate ability to lie, to act, to feign surprise and horror when it was needed. Psychopaths were great liars.
Michael Connelly
#18. Psychopaths are not crazy; they are fully aware of what they do, and the consequences of those actions.
Hannibal
#19. Half of what creates psychopaths is genetic, but the other half is conditioning.
James Norton
#20. War kills people; war kills animals; war kills plants; war kills buildings; war kills even shadows, because it annihilates the owner of the shadow! War is the psychopathy of the psychopaths!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#21. Measurement and categorization are, of course, fundamental to any scientific endeavor, but the implications of being able to identify psychopaths are as much practical as academic. To put it simply, if we can't spot them, we are doomed to be their victims, both as individuals and as a society.
Robert D. Hare
#22. 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.
Jon Ronson
#23. I think a lot of psychopaths are just geniuses who drove so fast that they lost control.
Criss Jami
#24. My main dream - and I'm trying to get 'Living TV' to do it - is to go into prison and interview serial killers, rapists, murderers, psychopaths.
Katie Price
#25. You might get the impression from the specifics of my less than stellar career that all line cooks are wacked-out moral degenerates, dope fiends, refugees, a thuggish assortment of drunks, sneak thieves, sluts and psychopaths. You wouldn't be too far off base.
Anthony Bourdain
#26. As institutional psychopaths, corporations are wont to remove obstacles that get into their way.
Joel Bakan
#27. A decent government with an effective, but not gratuitously violent, police force and a fair court system are essential. This deters and incapacitates psychopaths, bullies and hotheads - and if it earns the confidence of the people, they don't have to become violent in self-defence.
Steven Pinker
#28. Because like all psychopaths he was grandiose, and convinced of his own personal magnetism, assumed worship on the part of others.
Jonathan Kellerman
#30. The psychopaths are always around. In calm times we study them, but in times of upheaval, they rule over us.
Ernst Kretschmer
#31. less-intelligent psychopaths get caught and sent to prison while more-intelligent psychopaths tend to move into corporate or political occupations,
Dean A. Haycock
#32. I try, and I think I succeed, in making my readers feel pity for my psychopaths, because I do.
Ruth Rendell
#33. I told a journalist that Dave seemed quite psychopathic (I didn't know a thing about psychopaths but I assumed that that was the sort of thing they might do).
Jon Ronson
#34. There are people who have the capacity to imagine themselves as someone else, there are people who have no such capacity (when the lack is extreme, we call them psychopaths), and there are people who have the capacity but choose not to exercise it.
J.M. Coetzee
#35. 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.
Jon Ronson
#36. Bernie Ebbers and Ken Lay were caricatures - they were easy to spot. They were almost psychopaths. But it's much harder to spot problems at companies like Royal Dutch [Shell].
Charlie Munger
#37. In short, ISIS is composed of religiously motivated psychopaths,
Jay Sekulow
#38. The United States is excellent at breeding psychopaths - a country where we reward the individual with a hyperfocus on success at any cost. We reward narcissism - with our social networks and hideous reality television programs. We
Lisa Unger
#39. Rationality plays a crucial role in decision making, but without the moral compass of emotions and the steady guide of empathy we would just be cold psychopaths.
Nikolaos Dimitriadis
#40. Aside from battles, the history of nations seemed to consist of nothing but powerless old poops like myself, heavily medicated and vaguely beloved in the long ago, coming to kiss the boots of young psychopaths.
Kurt Vonnegut
#41. I have to admit that Christina is good - though I don't like giving credit to Candor smart-mouths - and so is Peter - though I don't like giving credit to future psychopaths.
Veronica Roth
#42. Fact: There are over 29,000,000 psychopaths worldwide.
Kent A. Kiehl
#43. If you ask me, psychopaths are more talented than the rest of us ... but they're still fucking psychopaths.
Jonathan Kellerman
#44. 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.
Jon Ronson
#45. Many psychopaths describe the traditional treatment programmes as finishing schools where they hone their skills. Where they find out that there are lots of techniques they had not thought about before.
Robert D. Hare
#46. Okay, that's enough. Everyone. Let's just calm down. We don't want to look bad in front of the psychopaths.
Tom Taylor
#47. I'm just an innocent racist who likes to flirt with young adult women And I meet emotionally retarded misfits who are kinky about infants' feet, scheming psychopaths, suicidal emos, brain dead skinheads and mestizos posing as white supremacists.
Greg Deane
#48. I sometimes find that playing the bad guy, or villains, or psychopaths tend to be much more psychologically rewarding. And you can really push it, you can push the limits, and get away with it.
Sean Bean
#49. Psychopaths play on the fact that most of us are trusting and forgiving people. The warning signs are always there; it's just difficult to see them because once we trust someone, the friendship becomes a blinder. - The Psychopath Next Door.
Mercy Cortez
#50. We are all born with an innate understanding of interpersonal equity - the idea that if you lend me your rake today, I'll respond in kind when you come to borrow my shovel tomorrow. Or nearly all of us are born with that. Psychopaths aren't.
Jeffrey Kluger
#51. Daesh is attacking us. Their leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, wants to destroy the Saudi state. These people are criminals. They're psychopaths.
Adel Al-Jubeir
#52. To kill for fun is the job of the psychopaths! And what is a matador, apart from being a mentally ill person?
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#53. To a happy war!' laughter echoed with all the insane glee of an army of psychopaths.
Stuart Hill
#54. 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.
Paul Bloom
#55. Chefs are nutters. They're all self-obsessed, delicate, dainty, insecure little souls and absolute psychopaths. Every last one of them.
Gordon Ramsay
#56. The only conspiracy that matters is the conspiracy of the psychopaths against the rest of us.
Kevin Barrett
#57. There are fundamentalist psychopaths in every religion in the world. Every single one.
Sophia Bush
#58. Fact: Seventy-seven percent of psychopaths in the United States are incarcerated.
Kent A. Kiehl
#59. Psychopaths tend to make exceptionally good eye contact.
Sam Harris
#60. 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.
Jon Ronson
#61. Have you not heard? Dark elves are psychopaths.
Anglia Spring
#62. I read a lot of books about psychopaths. I read a wonderful book Amy Hempel gave me about the guy who created criminal profiling - a fascinating book, 'Mind Hunter.'
Mona Simpson
#63. The only thing that disturbs me is that many psychopaths say they had a very happy childhood.
David Lynch
#64. The Germans are not a race of psychopaths, Alma. They're normal people like you and me, but with fanaticism, power, and impunity, anyone can turn into a monster, like the SS at Auschwitz, he told his sister.
Isabel Allende
#65. Self-Professed Black Magicians seem universally unable to fight, fuck, or even buy their way out of wet paper bags, despite phantasizing constantly about becoming powerful psychopaths.
Peter J. Carroll
#66. Not all psychopaths are in prison - some are in the boardroom.
Robert D. Hare
#67. There are two kinds of folks who sit around thinking about how to kill people: psychopaths and mystery writers.
Richard Castle
#68. At least she had a clear picture of what the Lying Game was now: Girl Scouts for psychopaths.
Sara Shepard
#69. June 2011 article in the Financial Times titled "Alfred Hitchcock's 'The Bankers' " noted, "The characteristics that make for good traders and investment bankers are pretty much the same as those that define psychopaths."107
Thom Hartmann
#70. But the fact is that we care a lot about what others think of us. The only people known to have no sociometer are psychopaths.
Jonathan Haidt
#71. Dr. Robert Hare (author of Without Conscience: The Disturbing World Of The Psychopaths Among Us)
Mick Strawser
#72. In a world of differing opinions, mentally unstable people and complete psychopaths, it was the type of simplistic notion that some people wouldn't want to follow or ignorance would just simply not allow them to understand.
S.A. Tawks
#73. Psychopaths, skillful as they are at manipulating others, have trouble with emotional regulation and generally screw up at either extreme: theatrical histrionics or cold stoicism.
Jonathan Kellerman
#74. When it comes to your self-esteem, it is best not to value the opinions of deluded psychopaths.
Rosen Trevithick
#75. Language and words for psychopaths are only word deep; there is no emotional colouring behind it. A psychopath can use a word like, 'I love you' but it means nothing more to him than if he said, 'I'll have a cup of coffee.'
Robert D. Hare
#76. He's really sort of the devil. He's completely emotionally detached. He has no empathy. You find that in psychopaths. It's about power with Voldemort. It's an aphrodisiac for him. Power makes him feel alive.
Ralph Fiennes
#77. Psychopaths are rats in the lab, Psychopaths don't have conscious... What next???
- (Dexter Series season 8 episode 3...)
Deyth Banger
#78. I have no doubt there are magician psychopaths, and magician serial killers. I doubt Brakebills admissions is very good at screening for those.
Lev Grossman
#79. Even psychopaths have emotions. Then again, maybe not.
Richard Ramirez
#80. I'm not blaming you-or her. Neither of you asked for what he did-there's no such thing as asking for it. That's a fucking lie argued by psychopaths and dumbasses. Okay?
Tammara Webber
#81. Psychopaths know the technical difference between right and wrong - which is one of the reasons their insanity pleas in criminal cases so rarely succeed; they just fail to act on that knowledge.
Jeffrey Kluger
#83. Psychopaths know intellectually what is immoral they just don't have a feeling of immorality about it.
Barbara Oakley
#84. There are problems with nursing - such as the issue of nurses all having to do degrees these days. But that doesn't mean to say the entire infrastructure of nursing is falling about and that it is populated by unfeeling psychopaths, which is, frankly, the implication sometimes.
Jo Brand
#85. People tend to think of psychopaths as criminals. In fact, the majority of psychopaths aren't criminal.
Robert D. Hare
#86. Rose only hangs out with guys and psychopaths," said Mia.
"Well," he said cheerfully, "since I'm both a psychopath and a guy, that would explain why we're such good friends.
Richelle Mead
#87. 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.
Jonathan Haidt
#88. It was ending too soon, the way everything did, everything except Ebola viruses and really bad people like psychopaths. Those things never ended.
Lev Grossman
#89. There are bad people in the world: Murderers and psychopaths and telemarketers who won't take no for an answer.
Jennifer Lynn Barnes
#90. Legislators and revolutionaries who promise equality and liberty at the same time, are either psychopaths or mountebanks.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#91. Serial killers ruin families,' shrugged Bob. 'Corporate and political and religious psychopaths ruin economies. They ruin societies.
Jon Ronson
#92. The thing is, I never see my characters as psychopaths. I see them as really crippled victims who just happen to do bad things. And I never see them as bad guys; I see them as darker characters. I never see anything as good or bad; it's more light or dark, and the in-between is the grey.
Michael Eklund
#93. Psychopaths ... people who know the differences between right and wrong, but don't give a shit. That's what most of my characters are like.
Elmore Leonard
#94. Fact: Psychopaths are six times more likely than other criminals to commit new crimes following release from prison.
Kent A. Kiehl
#95. 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.
Jon Ronson
#96. There are some people who always feel happy. They're called psychopaths
Tal Ben-Shahar
#97. Son, this is the United States of America. Some would say it's unconstitutional to try to prevent psychopaths from fulfilling their potential.
Dean Koontz
#98. Psychopaths view any social exchange as a 'feeding opportunity,' a contest or a test of wills in which there can be only one winner. Their motives are to manipulate and take, ruthlessly and without remorse.
Robert D. Hare
#99. Psychopaths don't act like Hannibal Lecter or Norman Bates. They come off like Hugh Grant, in his most adorable role.
Dave Cullen
#100. I remembered reading that the sweat and breath of certifiable psychopaths have a subtle but distinctive chemical odor because of certain physiological conditions accompanying that mental disorder. Maybe her breath smelled of craziness.
Dean Koontz
