Martha Stout Quotes - Page 2

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• 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.

  Martha Stout

  Book, Men, People

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I am always impressed by the fact that even the tiniest amount of being listened to, the barest suggestion of the possibility of kind treatment, can bring such an immediate rush of emotion. I think this is because we are almost never really listened to. In my work as a psychologist, I am reminded every day of how infrequently we are heard, any of us, or our actions even marginally understood. And one of the ironies of my "listening profession" is its lesson that, in many ways, each of us ultimately remains a mystery to everyone else.

  Martha Stout

  Thinking, Listening, Suggestions

  Martha Stout, Ph.D. (2005). “The Sociopath Next Door”, p.141, Harmony

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• When you were a child, where boredom could actually get to be painful. Sociopaths experience that kind of pain in boredom. And so to be alone, to have nobody to play the game with, can be painful. It's not exactly fear, it's a kind of pain.

  Martha Stout

  Children, Pain, Boredom

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Some parts of the population are starting to realize that character is extremely important and that it cannot be measured by the things we like to measure it by: the tabloids and so forth. Character is crucially important to a leader, to be a moral leader, and we'd better make it primary on our list or we're going to keep getting more of the same.

  Martha Stout

  Character, Leader, Important

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• People ask, "What could possibly cause a normal person to torture her own child?" Well, the answer is: Nothing could cause a normal person to torture their own child. The reason that we see that happening is that there are people who don't care, who don't love - even their own children.

  Martha Stout

  Children, People, Care

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Sociopaths are just like everybody else in that some of them are really brilliant, some of them are really stupid, and most of them are somewhere in between.

  Martha Stout

  Stupid, Brilliant, Sociopath

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• 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

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• The ultimate manipulation is to kill someone, and sociopathy is murderous in a psychological sense - there's a kind of soul-murder going on.

  Martha Stout

  Manipulation, Kind, Psychological

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Most of who we are is our deepest emotions, and someone who cannot feel those emotions in a positive way is never going to understand much about his fellow human beings.

  Martha Stout

  Emotion

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• To learn to be charming is fairly easy - you can teach somebody to be charming and to learn human emotions - or to learn the behaviors that go with human emotions. A sociopath, a smart one, will study the way we emote, and will learn how to do that quite effectively.

  Martha Stout

  Smart, Emotion, Study

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Sociopaths are not afraid of very much, except for physical harm and dying - really primitive, basic kinds of fears. The problem with being alone for a sociopath is boredom.

  Martha Stout

  Boredom, Dying, Kind

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Another thing that's fun for sociopath is speed, literal speed, going very fast in your car. Not that everybody who goes fast in their car is a sociopath, by any means, but anything that gives you a rush will lessen your sense of boredom.

  Martha Stout

  Fun, Mean, Giving

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Even famous people - are most concerned of all with what people who are close to them think. And the sociopath is generally not concerned with that at all.

  Martha Stout

  Thinking, People, Sociopath

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I am not allowed by my profession to diagnose somebody from a distance, but one can observe certain symptoms of sociopathy in George W. Bush.

  Martha Stout

  Distance, Profession

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Most of us fill up our lives and end our boredom with our involvement with other people - people we love, people we hate, people we're afraid of, people we're interested in - and that's what keeps our minds going. So if you're sociopathic and you really have no caring for anybody, there's not much left, only boredom, and the way to relieve that, apparently, is to play a game and make sure that you win.

  Martha Stout

  Hate, Caring, Winning

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• The physical basis for sociopathy is approximately 50 percent inheritable, which sounds more dramatic than it probably is, because most personality characteristics that psychologists test for and study the genetics of are about 50 percent inheritable. Introversion, extroversion, it turns out that they're about 50 percent inheritable, which means that somehow sociopathy is physical, it's organic.

  Martha Stout

  Mean, Personality, Study

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• 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

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• I think con man is the usual term. When somebody comes on television to tell a lot of needy people that God will send them to heaven if they send him $200, if that's not downright sociopathic, it's close.

  Martha Stout

  Men, Thinking, People

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I would hesitate to tell people to stop being kind or sympathetic to sociopath. But just like loyalty, some things that can be taken advantage of are empathy, sympathy, and our tendency to pity somebody when something has gone wrong in their life.

  Martha Stout

  Loyalty, Taken, People

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Controlling others—winning—is more compelling than anything (or anyone) else.

  Martha Stout

  Winning, Compelling

  Martha Stout, Ph.D. (2005). “The Sociopath Next Door”, p.47, Harmony

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• Someone, or some group in George W. Bush administration, took 300 million people to war against their will, based on a very giant lie. Combined with the notion of winning, that is, to me, a horrendously scary situation.

  Martha Stout

  War, Lying, Winning

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• 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

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• We are all a little crazy.

  Martha Stout

  Crazy, Littles

  Martha Stout (2002). “The Myth of Sanity: Divided Consciousness and the Promise of Awareness”, p.14, Penguin

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

  Martha Stout

  Fake, Easy, Conscience

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• 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

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