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.

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, the valient little girl's "Ick!"-her tendency to respond, to rock the boat, when someone's actions are really mean, may have been exciese from her behavior, and perhaps from her very mind.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.