Sociopathy is the inability to process emotional…

“A part of a healthy conscience is being able to confront consciencelessness. When you teach your daughter, explicitly or by passive rejection, that she…

— Martha Stout

I would hesitate to tell people to stop being kind or sympathetic to sociopath. But just like loyalty, some things that can be taken…

— Martha Stout

“when confronted with a destructive outcome that is clearly their doing, they will say, plain and simple, “I never did that,” and will to…

— Martha Stout

Usually sociopaths will look down upon us for that very reason - that we're gullible. We're weak. One person told me that he thought…

— Martha Stout

A conscience is, for a while anyway, pretty easy to fake.

— Martha Stout

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

— Martha Stout

The most reliable sign, the most universal behavior of unscrupulous people is not directed, as one might imagine, at our fearfulness. It is, perversely,…

— Martha Stout

When you were a child, where boredom could actually get to be painful. Sociopaths experience that kind of pain in boredom. And so to…

— Martha Stout

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

— Martha Stout

We raise our children, especially girls, to ignore their spontaneious reactions-we teach them not to rock the societal boat...By the time she is thirty,…

— Martha Stout

Most of who we are is our deepest emotions, and someone who cannot feel those emotions in a positive way is never going to…

— Martha Stout

“Unless under the spell of a psychotic delusion, extreme rage, inescapable deprivation, drugs, or a destructive authority figure, a person who is conscience-bound does…

— Martha Stout

“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of…

— Martha Stout

“And so without our primordial attachments to others, what would we be? Evidently, we would be the players of a game, one that resembled…

— Martha Stout

When I speak of divisions greater than gender or race, I say that because it is so unimaginable. I can imagine what it would…

— Martha Stout