Here is a collection of some of the most informative quotes on psychopaths and the psychopathic personality that we could find from lay and professional experts on the subjects. They are all scattered across out site in various articles, but we have pulled them all together here in a summary post.
General Quotes on Psychopaths
“Our default understanding of humanity is gonna be that everybody has some good in them. The research that Dr Robert Hare and Dr Martha Stout have done have really turned that around to say that 4% of human beings don’t have a conscience, they have no remorse for their behavior, and they actually look for opportunities to cause harm to others”
Jackson Mackenzie – see here.
“You’ll find from all walks of life, some people were perfectly good parents and will have a child who displays (psychopathic) behaviors once they grow up, and it’s very confusing because they feel they did everything correct.
Then you’ll find (psychopathy) as a result of (what) are described as attachment disorders. So the person who was maybe supposed to give them care or give them love, either ignored them or rejected them or neglected them…
… I think it would make sense that in order to shut down the remorse and shame parts of the brain, something not so good has happened”
Jackson Mackenzie – see here
“Planet Narco (The inner world of a psychopath or narcissist):
A broken, tempestuous mess. Barren, toxic and stormy. Baseline state is panic and emotional dysregulation. Power and emotional-reaction fixated”
Richard Grannon, Spartan Life Coach
“All the reading in the world cannot immunize you from the devastating effects of psychopaths. Everyone, including the experts, can be taken in, conned and left bewildered by them. A good psychopath can play a concerto on anyone’s heartstrings”.
Dr Robert Hare
“Should they express remose? Pull rank? Plead ignorance? Portray the bumbling fool? They’ll do whatever enables them to escape consequences”
Quotes on Spotting Psychopaths
“(Psychopaths) have this mask on them, and it takes a lot energy to keep that mask up, and every now and then it drops. And they’ll do something or say something that is so immoral or so out of sync with what a normal feeling person would do, that most normal people will go ‘what the hell was that? What did he just say?’. And it’s when you get those types of clues over time…..over time, you start to see contradictions between their character and their moral behavior”.
Stefan Verstappen – see here.
“People might assume that because I’ve been working on this concept of psychopathy for so long, that I can spot them from 100 paces and the answer is that I can’t. I’m no better at it than most other people. You cannot determine to what extent someone might be psychopathic simply by looking at them, even talking with this person for 5, 10 or 20 minutes. Sometimes it may take 6 months or a year. The problem……. is that we continue to evaluate people the way they appear to us”
Dr Robert Hare – see here
Quotes on Psychopaths & Relationships
“Imagine that the most handsome, charismatic person stares you straight in the eye and says ‘you’re special’….He seems to know just what you like, he reads your innermost thoughts. And you feel like you’ve discovered a soulmate, a deep intimacy. You’re experiencing one of those fleeting moments that makes life worth living. And before you know it you’re involved in a deep personal bond with a psychopath”
Fishhead documentary – see here.
“Almost every day, people who join our forum, they say ‘why did I stay in this (toxic relationship) for so long? How could I have been so stupid?’
The way that emotional abuse works is that it targets our most vulnerable human emotions in a way that – unless you’re aware what’s happening when you’re in the cycles of it – all it does is make a more and more intense bond ”
Jackson Mackenzie – see here.
“Custer B is the .. definition of reaction seeking or dramatic personality disorders. This is not ‘I want to go away and sit on my own in my room’, this is ‘I need to annoy you to live. I need to hurt you to feel OK. I need to cause chaos and drama wherever I go just to feel basically alright'”.
Richard Grannon
“One of the biggest things you can do for yourself if you are dealing with someone like this is to always remain calm when dealing with them because what you’ll find with psychopaths and narcissists especially is that they’re trying to provoke you.
They’re trying to provoke reactions so that you look crazy and hysterical and they can then sit back and play victim and say ‘oh look what this person did to me and how crazy they’re acting’.
If you remain calm completely with them, you gain that upper hand. They’re trying to put you on the defensive. They’re trying to make you feel like you’re under attack. So if they say the perfect thing that has you thinking ‘oh my god, I have to respond to that because I have the perfect response, you should know that was intentionally planned”
Jackson Mackenzie – see here.
“Once you’re in the psychopathic bond, you don’t want to break it. And it often amazes the friends who are watching from outside. “You’re still with him?”. Or “Can’t you see?” is very common. And they really can’t see, because of the strength of the bond that’s been built.
Now when the psychopath is done with you, they leave. They’ve never had a bond with you, it’s all been a game. And so they just stop playing and move on to the next target. You’re left with all these open wounds, because you thought you had a relationship with this person……
And that’s the psychological and emotional abuse of a psychopath – feeling no empathy, no remorse or no guilt, just moves on to the next target.
Paul Babiak, psychologist.
“If somebody has been practising to do a certain thing (ie. manipulate others) since the age of 3, and you come along as I was at age 30, and think you’re gonna do battle with them, what chance have I got? None, none whatsoever. You just get toyed with.”
Richard Grannon
“The worst part is, they pretended to be decent when you first met, sucking you in with this sweet, caring persona. They know how to be kind & good, but they find it boring.”
Jackson Mackenzie – see here.
If for whatever reason you are met with some legitimate suffering in your life, something in your family, or something is bringing you down…..you will definitely not be met with any sense of care or support from a psychopathic character.
In fact you’ll be met with the sound of bags being packed and taxis pulling up outside and ‘adios amigo’……..They don’t value you; they value the feelings that are awakened in them when they are in your presence…….You’ll find they’ll be gone from your life faster than the Roadrunner, the moment (these positive feelings they are getting off you) starts to head south.
Unslaved Podcast – see here
“That’s what you find when you have that self respect and self love, that a relationship with a disordered person won’t even work, because they’ll get so irritated that they’re not able to get under your skin and they’re not able to exploit you”
Jackson Mackenzie – see here.
Quotes on Psychopaths and Power
“Psychopaths expend an enormous amount of energy on (and get a great deal of pleasure out of) making you submit to their will and ego”
Psychopaths in Life
“The psychopath is strictly will to power….They are working strictly on the enslavement of your mind”
Unslaved Podcast – see here
“There is no doubt that if (the psychopath) had come from cold, indifferent, unloving parents, who kept on using the will to power to destroy and humiliate him, then he’s very likely to be forced into submission, and then become a disciple of the will to power.
He may become a disciple of the master-slave dynamic, because he’s trying to find the power that he was denied. He’s trying to exercise it on other people. He’s trying to be the master before he can be mastered. You’ll read this in numerous books on the subject….these specialists are always telling you that these guys want to kill before they’re killed. They do see the world as a very frightening place…..
….these are people who really want revenge on the world, because they think the world has hurt them. And in many cases maybe they’re right”
Unslaved Podcast
Quotes on Psychopaths & Change
“….in the past you would have kept tolerating, and kept trying to work it out with this person, or kept trying to explain to them how their behavior affects you. But that’s not what a person with high value does. That person walks away.”
Meredith Miller – see here
“In the end, after being well and truly drained and poisoned, idealistic fixers realize that they have made no progress (with the psychopath) whatsoever. (They have) merely upgraded their arsenal and become more experienced in deception”
Psychic Vampirism site – see here.
“People make the mistake of thinking ‘If i try harder, they’ll be a good person’. Or ‘If I love them more..’, or ‘If I talk to them about Jesus…’, all these approaches – forget about it. They don’t work. (Psychopaths) are incurable, as the all the research has shown time and time again.
Stefan Verstappen – see here.
“Psychopaths do not respond to any form of punishment or attempts to restrict or stop their destructive behavior. If one avenue of more covert and obvious troublemaking and bullying is punished or closed off, they will simply resort to more covert and subtle forms of toxic behaviour. In work and personal settings, this is often mind games and persistent, invasive prying into one’s boundaries and personal life, if outright and “out-front” bullying has been closed off as an option”
Psychopaths in Life
Quotes About Psychopaths in the Workplace
“Not all psychopaths are in prison – some are in the boardroom”
Dr Robert Hare
“Most businesses are risk averse or at least try to manage risk. A psychopath will do something risky just to see what happens, making a decision that others would have taken a long time and a lot of data to come to, they’ll do it on a whim. And because they are fearless, it could even hurt them, but it doesn’t bother them”
Paul Babiak – psychologist
“A really psychopathic boss can make for a really toxic culture where there’s lots of backstabbing and subterfuge and lying and deceit and people throwing each other under the bus. So it can be a really toxic workplace when it’s someone at the top……Certainly, we’ve seen in the last few years more and more reports of the real dangers of abusive workplaces and what people have endured in those settings”.
Dr Ramani Durvasula
“When you are in workplaces where the person you report to directly is a psychopath, the key again is document, document, document”
Dr Ramani Durvasula – see here.
“Psychopaths smear their accuser/target.
If that’s you, they ruin your credibility, often starting the smear campaign long before you even realize what they’ve done to you. When everything blows up, you have no support.”
Lovefraud.com
“It’s called the smear campaign and it started even before your breakup or the blowup in a work situation…What they’re doing is provoking reactions from you and then sneaking around sharing those reactions with people to slowly show this person is going “crazy”….
That smear campaign is about turning people against you, even your own friends, so you have no support after it’s done”
Jackson Mackenzie – see here
“What you don’t want to do is gossip about the psychopath because they’re better at that than you are. They’re already stabbing you in the back…way ahead of you. They’re going to play this game way better than you so you’re best off trying to play a clean game rather than trying to beat them at their own game”.
Dr Ramani Durvasula
