Martha Stout Quotes About Conscience

Quotes about: Conscience

• 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.

  Martha Stout

  Daughter, Rocks, People

• 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.

  Martha Stout

  Pain, Acting, Demand

  Martha Stout, Ph.D. (2005). “The Sociopath Next Door”, p.68, Harmony

• When I speak of divisions greater than gender or race, I say that because it is so unimaginable. I can imagine what it would be like to be another race. Or to be a man - I could draw that up in my mind and experience it. Schizophrenia? We're all schizophrenic in our dreams. Depression? Most of us have been at least a little depressed and can imagine it. But not having a conscience? Conscience is so profound and so basic in most of us.

  Martha Stout

  Dream, Men, Profound

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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

  Martha Stout

  Way, One Way, Conscience

• 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."

  Martha Stout

  Revenge, Thinking, People

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 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.

  Martha Stout

  Voice, Trying, Way

  Martha Stout, Ph.D. (2005). “The Sociopath Next Door”, p.216, Harmony

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

  Martha Stout

  Fake, Easy, Conscience

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• Conscience is a creator of meaning. As a sense of constraint rooted in our emotional ties to one another, it prevents life from devolving into nothing but a long and essentially boring game of attempted dominance over our fellow human beings, and for every limitation conscience imposes on us, it gives us a moment of connectedness with an other, a bridge to someone or something outside of our often meaningless schemes.

  Martha Stout

  Emotional, Ties, Games

• 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 he was the only honest person because he would admit that he didn't have a conscience and everybody else was clearly faking it.

  Martha Stout

  Honest, Gullible, Reason

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 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.

  Martha Stout

  Thinking, People, Imagine

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 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.

  Martha Stout

  People, Acting, Scare

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 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.

  Martha Stout

  Behavior, Conscience

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• If you have reached the point where you're certain that person has no conscience, or is in it to win rather than to love you, then the very best thing you can do is to get away. That's a very hard lesson to learn, and, furthermore, it's not always possible.

  Martha Stout

  Love You, Winning, Get Away

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 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.

  Martha Stout

  Intelligent, People, Guilt

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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