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

A part of a healthy conscience is being able to confront consciencelessness. When you teach your daughter, explicitly or by passive rejection, that she must ignore her outrage, that she must be kind and accepting to the point of not defending herself or other people, that she must not rock the boat for any reason, you are NOT strengthening her posocial sense, you are damaging it-and the first person she will stop protecting is herself.

I am sure that if the devil existed, he would want us to feel very sorry for him.

Sociopaths love power. They love winning. If you take loving kindness out of the human brain, there's not much left except the will to win.

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

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.

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.