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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.