His second message was that a smart orator could, if he knew the tricks, hypnotize the crowd into acquiescence or whip it up to do his bidding. Le Bon listed the tricks: ‘A crowd is only impressed by...
You keep staying on our block we gonna have to show you what the burner do. Thank you, it’s great meeting you, says Phoenix. What’s a burner? I whisper. A gun, Phoenix whispers back. The man loops and...
You combine insecurity and ambition, and you get an inability to say no to things.
Yeah,' said Al. 'I'm very prone to boredom. I gotta go do something. Yeah. That's a fair statement. I'm not the most relaxed person in the world. My mind does not stop working all night.'
We are defining the boundaries of normality by tearing apart the people outside it.
Tony said just being here can be enough to turn someone crazy.
They assumed the endeavor was brilliant and rational because they were brilliant and rational, and we tend to automatically assume that everybody else is basically just like us.
There’s an old Internet adage that as soon as you compare something to the Nazis you lose the argument.
There are obviously a lot of very ill people out there. But there are also people in the middle, getting overlabeled, becoming nothing more than a big splurge of madness in the minds of the people who...
The men would all say that they had died,' Gilligan said. 'These were the most incorrigibly violent characters. They would all say that they themselves had died. They felt dead inside. They had no cap...
The justice system in the West has a lot of problems, Poe said, but at least there are rules. You have basic rights as the accused. You have your day in court. You don’t have any rights when you’re ac...
That's an incredibly depressing thought, I said that if you're in a room and at one end lies madness and at the other end lies sanity it is human nature to veer towards the madness end.
TV is just troubled people being booed these days.
She summarized: So. Don’t get shitfaced, don’t fist her ass, enjoy.
Psychopaths don't change, she [Essi Viding] said. They don't learn from punishment. The best you can hope for is that they'll eventually get too old and lazy to be bothered to offend. And they can see...
Others took exception to being forced to wear little-girl-type dresses (a psychopath-devised punishment for noncooperation in the program).
Most goat-related military activity is still highly classified.
Ignominy is universally acknowledged to be a worse punishment than death . . . It would seem strange that ignominy should ever have been adopted as a milder punishment than death, did we not know that...
He did another experiment, the Startle Reflex Test, in which psychopaths and non-psychopaths were invited to look at grotesque images, like crime-scene photographs of blown-apart faces, and then when...
Guy Savelli's role in the War on Terror began when half-a-dozen strangers, within days of one another, contacted him via e-mail and telephone in the winter of 2003. They asked him if he had the power...