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

A swarm of authorities

Likewise I claim there's no difference between an usurping tyrant and an outlaw or a roaming brigand. This definition was given to Alexander: Because a tyrant, having an army, has the greater power to massacre and burn down house and home and raze all flat, they call him a general; but because an outlaw has only a small following and cannot do as much damage or bring the same ruin upon a country, he's called a thief or brigand. Not being book-learned, I won't quote a swarm of authorities but go on with the story I began.

- from Wright's adaptation of The Canterbury Tales, from "The Manciple's Tale," pg. 328.

every Man must dance in Chains

Hath any Commentator well accounted for the Limitation which an antient Critic hath set to the Drama, which he will have contain neither more nor less than five acts? Or hath any one living attempted to explain, what the modern Judges of our Theatres mean by that Word low; by which they have happily succeeded in banishing all Humour from the Stage, and have made the Theater as dull as a Drawing-room? Upon all these Occasions, the World seems to have embraced a Maxim of our Law, viz. Cuicunque in Arte sua perito credendum est*: For it seems, perhaps, difficult to conceive that any one should have had enough of Impudence, to lay down dogmatical Rules in any Art or Science without the least Foundation. In such Cases, therefore, we are apt to conclude, there are sound and good Reasons at the Bottom, though we are unfortunately not able to see so far.

Now, in reality, the World have paid too great a Compliment to Critics, and have imagined them Men of much greater Profundity than they really are. From this Complaisance, the Critics have been emboldened to assume a Dictatorial Power, and have so far succeeded, that they are now become the Masters, and have the Assurance to give Laws to those Authors, from whose Predecessors they originally received them.

...For these Critics being Men of shallow Capacities, very easily mistook mere Form for Substance. They acted as a Judge would, who should adhere to the lifeless Letter of the Law, and reject the Spirit. Little Circumstances which were, perhaps, accidental in a great Author were, by these Critics, considered to constitute his chief Merit, and transmitted as Essentials to be observed by his Successors. To these Encroachments, Time and Ignorance, the two great Supporters of Imposture, gave Authority; and thus, many Rules for good Writing have been established, which have not the least Foundation in Truth or Nature; and which commonly serve for no other purpose than to curb and restrain Genius, in the same Manner as it would have restrained the Dancing-master, had the many excellent Treatises on that Art laid it down as an essential Rule, that every Man must dance in Chains.

- from The History of Tom Jones, 186. The Latin phrase means "Anyone expert in his profession should be believed."

Literary history is an artifice

We envisage the literature of every century as a corpus of works grouped around a core of classics; and we derive our notion of the classics from our professors, who took it from their professors, who got it from theirs, and so on, back to some disappearing point in the early nineteenth century. Literary history is an artifice, pieced together over many generations, shortened here and lengthened there, worn thin in some places, patched over in others, and laced through everywhere with anachronism. It bears little relation to the actual experience of literature in the past.

- from The Forbidden Best-sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France, Robert Darnton