A cheering section

Women have very rarely engaged in combat, but have often played auxiliary roles in mobilization and logistics. Before hostilities commenced, they might shame cowards, taunt the hesitant, and participate in dances of incitement. Among some groups, women have accompanied war parties to carry weapons and food. During combat, they might serve as a cheering section, supply first aid, or collect spent enemy missiles to resupply their own warriors....

from War Before Civilization, Lawrence Keeley, 35.

They were the same people before

Think, for example, of John Wayne Gacy, [...] Ted Bundy, [...] and Kenneth Bianchi.

We now diagnose most of these people as psychopaths, but the crucial point here is that their disorder and its behavior did not suddenly appear full-blown out of nowhere. They were the same people before they were caught as they were afterward. They are psychopaths now and they were psychopaths before.

This is a disturbing thought, because it suggests that the cases that come to the public's attention represent only the tip of a very large iceberg.

The rest of the iceberg is to be found nearly everywhere - in business, the home, the professions, the military, the arts, the entertainment industry, the news media, academe, and the blue-collar world. Millions of men, women, and children daily suffer terror, anxiety, pain, and humiliation at the hands of the psychopaths in their lives.

Tragically, these victims often cannot get other people to understand what they are going through...

- from Without Conscience, Robert D. Hare, 115

Punching my sister

"In 1964, 300 years after he made his mark on the world, a page in one of his [Isaac Newton] notebooks, penned cryptically in 1662, was finally decoded; on it, addressed to God, was a list of sins 19-year old Newton had committed."

Some selections:

2. Eating an apple at Thy house
3. Making a feather while on Thy day
4. Denying that I made it
14. Wishing death and hoping it to some
15. Striking many
16. Having uncleane thoughts words and actions and dreamese
17. Stealing cherry cobs from Eduard Storer
18. Denying that I did so
24. Punching my sister
25. Robbing my mothers box of plums and sugars
26. Calling Derothy Rose a jade
44. Beating Arthur Storer


- from Lists of Note, ed. Shaun Usher

On psychopathology -

"Only when the concrete details of environment are laid in, as, for instance, in an honest and discerning novel, can the significance of behavior be well appreciated. Certainly no brief case summary and probably no orthodox psychiatric history can succeed in portraying the character and the behavior of [psychopaths] as they appear day after day and year after year in actual life.
    
It is not enough to set down that a certain patient stole his brother's watch or that another got drunk in a poolroom while his incipient bride waited at the altar. To get the feel of the person whose behavior shows disorder, it is necessary to feel something of his surroundings. ... It is all but impossible to demonstrate any of the fundamental symptoms in the psychopath [in the hospital alone]. The substance of the problem, real as it is in life, disappears, or at least escapes our specialized means of perception, when the patient is removed from the milieu in which he is to function."

- Hervey Cleckly, The Mask of Sanity, 1941.