Psychopath Quotes

“I think a lot of psychopaths are just geniuses who drove so fast that they lost control.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“It strikes me profoundly that the world is more often than not a bad and cruel place.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

“He lives down in a ribcage in the dry leaves of a heart.”
― Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs

“God's creatures who cried themselves to sleep stirred to cry again.”
― Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs

“Playing the victim role: Manipulator portrays him- or herself as a victim of circumstance or of someone else's behavior in order to gain pity, sympathy or evoke compassion and thereby get something from another. Caring and conscientious people cannot stand to see anyone suffering and the manipulator often finds it easy to play on sympathy to get cooperation.”
― George K. Simon Jr., In Sheep's Clothing: Understanding and Dealing With Manipulative People

“Parents who discipline their child by discussing the consequences of their actions produce children who have better moral development , compared to children whose parents use authoritarian methods and punishment.”
― Simon Baron-Cohen, Zero Degrees of Empathy: A New Theory of Human Cruelty

“Prisons are full of sociopaths and psychopaths, but when questioned, the imprisoned sociopath will honestly admit that they will commit any number of crimes to help a friend.

A friend will help you move; a true friend will help you move a body.

A friend will bail you out of jail; a true friend will be sitting beside you.

Who wouldn’t want to have a true friend? But they sound a lot like a sociopath.”
― Tanya Thompson, Assuming Names: A Con Artist's Masquerade

“I'm an 'intelligent' sociopath. I don't have problems with drugs, I don't commit crimes, I don't take pleasure in hurting people, and I don't typically have relationship problems. I do have a complete lack of empathy. But I consider that an advantage, most of the time. Do I know the difference between right and wrong, and do I want to be good? Sure. ... A peaceful and orderly world is a more comfortable world for me to live in. So do I avoid breaking the law because it's 'right'? No, I avoid breaking the law because it makes sense.”
― M. E. Thomas, Confessions of a Sociopath: A Life Spent Hiding in Plain Sight

“You who call women the fairer sex, you may repress and deny all you want, but some of us were born with a howling void where our souls should sway”
― Chelsea G. Summers, A Certain Hunger

“The world, viewed philosophically, remains a series of slave camps, where citizens – tax livestock – labor under the chains of illusion in the service of their masters.”
― Stefan Molyneux

“It is so easy at times for a lonely individual to begin fantasizing about what the people outside are saying about him and, in result, irrationally and fearfully, and sometimes angrily, fancy himself a villain.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“God judges men from the inside out; men judge men from the outside in. Perhaps to God, an extreme mental patient is doing quite well in going a month without murder, for he fought his chemical imbalance and succeeded; oppositely, perhaps the healthy, able and stable man who has never murdered in his life yet went a lifetime consciously, willingly never loving anyone but himself may then be subject to harsher judgment than the extreme mental patient. It might be so that God will stand for the weak and question the strong.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“It's a poem about moths. But it's also a poem about psychopaths.
I get it copied. And stick it in a frame.

And now it glowers redoubtably above my desk:an entomological keepsake of the horizons of existence.

And the brutal, star-crossed wisdom of those who seek them out.

i was talking to a moth
the other evening
he was trying to break into
an electric bulb
and fry himself on the wires

why do you fellows
pull this stunt i asked him
because it is the conventional
thing for moths or why
if that had been an uncovered
candle instead of an electric
light bulb you would
now be a small unsightly cinder
have you no sense

plenty of it he answered
but at times we get tired
of using it
we get bored with routine
and crave beauty
and excitement
fire is beautiful
and we know that if we get
too close it will kill us
but what does that matter
it is better to be happy
for a moment
and be burned up with beauty
than to live a long time
and be bored all the while
so we wad all our life up
into one little roll
and then we shoot the roll
that is what life is for
it is better to be part of beauty
our attitude toward life
is come easy go easy
we are like human beings
used to be before they became
too civilized to enjoy themselves

and before i could argue him
out of his philosophy
he went and immolated himself
on a patent cigar lighter
i do not agree with him
myself i would rather have
half the happiness and twice
the longevity

but at the same time i wish
there was something i wanted
as badly as he wanted to fry himself”
― Kevin Dutton, The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success

“Deep pockets and empty hearts rule the world. We unleash them at our peril.”
― Stefan Molyneux

“Psychopaths [make] the world go around...society [is] an expression of that particular sort of madness...I've always believed society to be a fundamentally rational thing, but what if it isn't? What if it is built on insanity?”
― Jon Ronson, The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry

“Don't give over all of your critical faculties to people in power, no matter how admirable those people may appear to be. Beneath the hero's facade you will find a human being who makes human mistakes. Enormous problems arise when human mistakes are made on the grand scale available to a superhero. And sometimes you run into another problem. It is demonstrable that power structures tend to attract people who want power for the sake of power and that a significant proportion of such people are imbalanced — in a word, insane.”
― Frank Herbert

“The 16 characteristics of psychopaths:

1. Intelligent
2. Rational
3. Calm
4. Unreliable
5. Insincere
6. Without shame or remorse
7. Having poor judgment
8. Without capacity for love
9. Unemotional
10. Poor insight
11. Indifferent to the trust or kindness of others
12. Overreactive to alcohol
13. Suicidal
14. Impersonal sex life
15. Lacking long-term goals
16. Inadequately motivated antisocial behavior”
― Hervey M. Cleckley, The Mask of Sanity

“I realised from quite early on in my childhood that I saw things differently from other people,' he wrote. 'But, more than not, it's helped me in my life. Psychopathy(if that's what you call it) is like a medicine for modern times. If you take it in moderation it can prove extremely beneficial. It can alleviate a lot of existential ailments that we would otherwise fall victim to because our fragile psychological immune systems just aren't up to the job of protecting us. But if you take too much of it, if you overdose on it, then there can, as is the case with all medicines, be some rather unpleasant side effects.”
― Kevin Dutton, The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success

“This was truly to be a radical milestone: the world’s first-ever marathon nude psychotherapy session for criminal psychopaths. Elliott’s raw, naked, LSD-fueled sessions lasted for epic eleven day stretches. The psychopaths spent every waking moment journeying to their darkest corners in an attempt to get better. There were no distractions—no television, no clothes, no clocks, no calendars, only a perpetual discussion (at least one hundred hours every week) of their feelings. When they got hungry, they sucked food through straws that protruded through the walls. As during Paul Bindrim’s own nude psychotherapy sessions, the patients were encouraged to go to their rawest emotional places by screaming and clawing at the walls and confessing fantasies of forbidden sexual longing for one another...”
― Jon Ronson, The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry

“...He has all the uncanny intuitions of a psychopath. Have you ever dealt with one? It's almost like a form of mind-reading...”
― Sue Grafton, G is for Gumshoe

“Hitler is a monster of wickedness, insatiable in his lust for blood and plunder. Not content with having all Europe under his heel, or else terrorized into various forms of abject submission, he must now carry his work of butchery and desolation among the vast multitudes of Russia and of Asia. The terrible military machine, which we and the rest of the civilized world so foolishly, so supinely, so insensately allowed the Nazi gangsters to build up year by year from almost nothing, cannot stand idle lest it rust or fall to pieces. It must be in continual motion, grinding up human lives and trampling down the homes and the rights of hundreds of millions of men. Moreover it must be fed, not only with flesh but with oil.”
― Sir Winston Churchill

“I don't laugh very much," he said, realizing the truth of the statement as he made it, this sudden bit of knowledge disturbing him.”
― Robert Cormier, Tenderness

“A gator smile past happy hour;
eyes above the filth of truth
Judging me from his sex swamp,
oh, this cold blood bleeds power
All dead at the kissing booth;
mirrored reptile tail-swing stomp”
― Casey Renee Kiser, Altered States of the Unflinching Souls

“It's such an intimate thing, to witness another's death. Orgasms are a dime a dozen. Any old human woman can see a man orgasm. We so rarely get to see them die; it has been my greatest gift and my most divine privilege.”
― Chelsea G. Summers, A Certain Hunger

“You who call women the fairer sex, you may repress and deny all you want, but some of us were born with a howling void where our souls should sway. I am a psychopath—and whatever their reasoning and whatever their diagnoses, the eager psychology and criminal justice students are all right to study me. And if they're wrong, I still enjoy their attention, and I'll do what I must to encourage it.”
― Chelsea G. Summers, A Certain Hunger

“I think about Patsy Cline, also killed in a plane
crash. Before her death, she supposedly said, “Don’t worry about me, hoss.
When it’s my time to go, it’s my time.” I wonder if she was able to maintain
that attitude as the plane went down.”
― Rachel Harrison, So Thirsty

“I especially liked it when, at the end, they begged for their lives. When they did that—and they all did that eventually—I would pretend to hesitate and see in their eyes the glimmer of a final, desperate hope. I let them have that for an instant. Then, I took it away. That—that extinguishing of their very last hope—I savored more than anything, even more than the extinguishing of their lives.
You see, it was at that moment they could feel the presence of the Devil and would beg God to come and deliver them from him. And it was in that moment that I made them see—that they finally realized—God had been there all along. It was then they understood: the Devil was just God in his night attire.”
― Craig Russell, The Devil Aspect

“From Player to Psychopath to Psychotic to Pantokrator to Patient to Prisoner & vice versa.”
― Sino Melo

“Christians who retaliate with spite aren't followers of Christ, but reflections of unresolved pain – their hearts need healing, not just holy words.”
― Shaila Touchton

“as if I’d just proven myself to be the perfect girlfriend, he smiled. And to someone like him – a psycho cloaked in charm – I probably was.”
― Samama Reza, To Hell With You