Latest Martha Stout Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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 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.

  Martha Stout

  Thinking, Long, People

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 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

• Sociopaths differ fairly dramatically in how their brains react to emotional words. An emotional word is love, hate, anger, mom, death, anything that we associate with an emotional reaction. We are wired to process those words more readily than neutral, nonemotional words. We are very emotional creatures. But sociopaths listen as evenly to emotional words as they do to lamp or book - there's no neurological difference.

  Martha Stout

  Mom, Hate, Book

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 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

• 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

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

  Martha Stout

  Fake, Easy, Conscience

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 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.

  Martha Stout

  Fun, Drinking, Boredom

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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.

  Martha Stout

  Hurt, Trying, Wonder

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 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.

  Martha Stout

  Attitude, Lying, Acceptance

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 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

• 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

• 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.

  Martha Stout

  Children, Thinking, Winning

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com