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.

Sociopathy is the inability to process emotional experience, including love and caring, except when such experience can be calculated as a coldly intellectual task.

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.

We are all a little crazy.

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.

The most reliable sign, the most universal behavior of unscrupulous people is not directed, as one might imagine, at our fearfulness. It is, perversely, an appeal to our sympathy.

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.