Quotessence
Home / Topics / Pathology Quotes

Pathology Quotes

Browse 104 quotes about Pathology.

Related topics

PeopleSocialStates

Pathology Quotes

“During the 1992 election I concluded as early as my first visit to New Hampshire that Bill Clinton was hateful in his behavior to women, pathological as a liar, and deeply suspect when it came to money in politics. I have never had to take any of that back, whereas if you look up what most of my profession was then writing about the beefy, unscrupulous 'New Democrat,' you will be astonished at the quantity of sheer saccharine and drool. Anyway, I kept on about it even after most Republicans had consulted the opinion polls and decided it was a losing proposition, and if you look up the transcript of the eventual Senate trial of the president—only the second impeachment hearing in American history—you will see that the last order of business is a request (voted down) by the Senate majority leader to call Carol and me as witnesses. So I can dare to say that at least I saw it through.”

PoliticsWomenMoneyHistoryUnited StatesLiesCorruptionTrialsSexismMisogynyElectionsPathologyImpeachmentNew HampshirePresidentsChauvinismBill ClintonUs Presidents1992Impeachment Of Bill ClintonUs SenateRepublican Party UsCarol BlueDemocratic Party UsNew DemocratsUs Presidential Election 1992
Book:Hitch 22: A Memoir
Create image

“Recently I interviewed a psychopath. This is always a humbling experience because it teaches over and over how much of human motivation and experience is outside my narrow range. Despite the psychopath's lack of conscience and lack of empathy for others, he is inevitably better at fooling people than any other type of offender. I suppose conscience just slows you down. A child convicted molester, this particular one made friends with a correctional officer who invited him to live in his home after he was released - despite the fact the officer had a nine-year-old daughter. The officer and his wife were so taken with the offender that, after the offender lived with them for a few months, they initiated adoption proceedings- adoption for a man almost their age. Of course, he was a child molester living in the same house as a child. Not surprisingly, he molested the daughter the entire time he lived there. [...] What these experiences taught have me is that even when people are warned of a previously founded case of even a conviction, they still routinely underestimate the pathology with which they are dealing.”

EmpathyConscienceLiesPrisonConvictionJailChild AbuseCharmingChild Sexual AbusePsychopathLiarCriminalPathologyGroomingGuardPedophilesTrickedPredatorsOffenderFoolingChild MolestersCon ManPrison Officer
Book:Predators: Pedophiles, Rapists, and Other Sex Offenders
Create image

“It would be futile to delude ourselves that at present, readers find every pathography unsavory. This attitude is excused with the reproach that from a pathographic elaboration of a great man one never obtains an understanding of his importance and his attainments, that it is therefore useless mischief to study in him things which could just as well be found in the first comer. However, this criticism is so clearly unjust that it can only be grasped when viewed as a pretext and a disguise for something. As a matter of fact pathography does not aim at making comprehensible the attainments of the great man; no one should really be blamed for not doing something which one never promised. The real motives for the opposition are quite different. One finds them when one bears in mind that biographers are fixed on their heroes in quite a peculiar manner. Frequently they take the hero as the object of study because, for reasons of their personal emotional life, they bear him a special affection from the very outset. They then devote themselves to a work of idealization which strives to enroll the great men among their infantile models, and to revive through him, as it were, the infantile conception of the father. For the sake of this wish they wipe out the individual features in his physiognomy, they rub out the traces of his life's struggle with inner and outer resistances, and do not tolerate in him anything of human weakness or imperfection; they then give us a cold, strange, ideal form instead of the man to whom we could feel distantly related. It is to be regretted that they do this, for they thereby sacrifice the truth to an illusion, and for the sake of their infantile phantasies they let slip the opportunity to penetrate into the most attractive secrets of human nature.”

LifeArtistSufferingMischiefPathologyDa Vinci
Book:Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood
Create image

“The "pathology of normalcy" rarely deteriorates to graver forms of mental illness because society produces the antidote against such deterioration. When pathological processes become socially patterned, they lose their individual character. On the contrary, the sick individual finds himself at home with all other similarly sick individuals. The whole culture is geared to this kind of pathology and arranged the means to give satisfactions which fit the pathology. The result is that the average individual does not experience the separateness and isolation the fully schizophrenic person feels. He feels at ease among those who suffer from the same deformation, in fact, it is the fully sane person who feels isolated in the insane society - and he may suffer so much from the incapacity to communicate that it is he who may become psychotic.”

IndividualSocietyInsanitySanityIndividualismOriginalityAlienationPathology
Book:The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness
Create image

“A little later, when breakfast was over and I had not yet gone up-stairs to my room, I had my first interview with Doctor Brandon, the famous alienist who was in charge of the case. I had never seen him before, but from the first moment that I looked at him I took his measure, almost by intuition. He was, I suppose, honest enough -- I have always granted him that, bitterly as I have felt toward him. It wasn't his fault that he lacked red blood in his brain, or that he had formed the habit, from long association with abnormal phenomena, of regarding all life as a disease. He was the sort of physician -- every nurse will understand what I mean -- who deals instinctively with groups instead of with individuals. He was long and solemn and very round in the face; and I hadn't talked to him ten minutes before I knew he had been educated in Germany, and that he had learned over there to treat every emotion as a pathological manifestation. I used to wonder what he got out of life -- what any one got out of life who had analyzed away everything except the bare structure.”

PsychologyAnalysisPsychiatryPsychiatristPsychologistPathologyAlienist Doctor
Book:The Shadowy Third
Create image

“There is a noticeable element of the pathological in some current leftist critiques, which I tend to attribute to feelings of guilt allied to feelings of impotence. Not an attractive combination, because it results in self-hatred.”

PsychologyGuiltIraq WarWar On TerrorImpotenceSelf HatredPathologyLeftismAntiwar Movement
Book:Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left
Create image

“Even though the world hails Joan of Arc as some sort of hero, which she undoubtedly was, what pains me the most is that her pathological condition ultimately led to her demise at the age of only nineteen.”

ConsciousnessWisdom QuotesGod QuotesMysticismScience And ReligionNeuroscienceKingdom Of GodPhilosophy Of ScienceNeuropsychologyNeurotheologyPathologyCognitive ScienceEpilepsyNeurological DisorderJoan Of ArcScience And Religion QuotesJoan Of Arc The Mystic Legacy
Book:Love, God & Neurons: Memoir of a scientist who found himself by getting lost
Create image

“The situation with regard to insulin is particularly clear. In many parts of the world diabetic children still die from lack of this hormone. ... [T]hose of us who search for new biological facts and for new and better therapeutic weapons should appreciate that one of the central problems of the world is the more equitable distribution and use of the medical and nutritional advances which have already been established. The observations which I have recently made in parts of Africa and South America have brought this fact very forcible to my attention.”

ChildrenScienceMedicineTreatmentAfricaDiabetesSouth AmericaPathologyHormoneDiscoverer Of Insulin
Author:Charles Herbert Best
Create image

“As a rule, sexually selected traits tend to be more condition-dependent --and thus more vulnerable to dysfunctions-- than other phenotypes. This contributes to explain why males are generally more vulnerable to both harmful mutations and environmental insults.”

ScienceEvolutionWeaknessMedicineSicknessMalePathologySexual SelectionEvolutionary Studies
Book:Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach
Create image

“While we readily see the problem with a person being oblivious to or dismissive of his problematic thinking and behavior, we are not as quick to see the problem with someone obsessively dwelling on whatever negative aspect of himself that looms forth in his mind at the moment. Mental health counselors recognize both of these behaviors as equally pathological in blocking the individual's ability to make positive changes.”

ForgivenessGuiltPositive ChangePathologyNegative Mindset
Book:Some Universals, Vol. 2: Intention and Attention
Create image

“All biological and artificial mechanisms -no matter how well designed- are vulnerable to malfunctions, failures, and breakdowns. Even if developmental processes are canalized against perturbations, they can deviate from their target phenotype as random events and disturbances accumulate over time.”

ScienceEvolutionMedicinePathologyEvolutionary Studies
Book:Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach
Create image

“Delusion has its roots in pathology. It is a "false belief, held with absolute conviction, despite superior evidence." Delusion is a sign you are not functioning. But I believe in delusion as a creative exercise. A way to augment reality.”

RealityCreativityDelusionCreativity QuotesPathologyDelusionsAugmented RealityFalse BeliefAugmentationCreative Exercise
Book:The Monkey in the Basement and Other Delusions
Create image

“One of the fundamental demonstrations of our natural instinct to Bond with each other is a will to give. Rather than domination, our most basic urge is to reach out to another human being, even at a cost to ourselves. Giving to others-the urge to empathize, to be compassionate, and to help others altruistically-is not the exception to the rule, but our natural state of being. Our impulse to connect with each other has developed an automatic desire to do for others, even at personal cost. Altruism comes naturally to us. It is selfishness that is culturally conditioned and a sign of pathology.”

InspirationalGivingHumansStatesHelpingDesireNaturalHuman BeingsCostFundamentalsInstinctHelping OthersSelfishnessImpulseExceptionUrgesCompassionateReach OutAltruismDominationDemonstrationPathologyGiving To OthersNatural InstinctSelf GivingException To The Rule
Author:Lynne McTaggart
Create image

“War is not a pathology that, with proper hygiene and treatment, can be wholly prevented. War is a natural condition of the State, which was organized in order to be an effective instrument of violence on behalf of society. Wars are like deaths, which, while they can be postponed, will come when they will come and cannot be finally avoided.”

WarStatesOrderNaturalViolenceConditionsInstrumentsOrganizedTreatmentBehalfAvoidedHygienePathology
Author:Philip Bobbitt
Create image

“Consensual paranoia - the pathology of the normal person who is a member of a war-justifying society - forms the template from which all the images of the enemy are created. By studying the logic of paranoia, we can see why certain archetypes of the enemy must necessarily recur, no matter what the historical circumstances.”

PersonsWarMatterFormCertainEnemyStudyAtheismCircumstancesMembersNormalLogicNo Matter WhatHistoricalPositive AtheismParanoiaArchetypePathology
Author:Sam Keen
Create image

“In our 'don't just sit there, do something' culture, when we get sick we are supposed to become characters in a heroic medical narrative that conceals the remorselessness of pathology, the intractable fact of human vulnerability, and the inevitable inadequacies of medicine. To many of the participants in the medical drama, aggressive treatment - even when it fails - represents a quasi-religious quest for immortality and meaning.”

HumansCharacterFactsCultureReligiousFailingDramaSickMedicineIllnessMedicalInevitableNarrativeImmortalityVulnerabilityTreatmentAggressiveHeroicQuestsParticipantsInadequacyPathology
Author:Suzanne Gordon
Create image

“Look, we'll have to confront the pathologies of poverty at some point. We can deal with them cheaply at the front end, in infancy. Or we can wait and jail a troubled adolescent at the tail end. To some extent, we face a choice between investing in preschools or in prisons.”

LooksEndsRealityFacesChoicesPoliticsWaitingCommunityJusticeMoneyDealsEducationPovertyHistoryGenerationsFrontsHuman NaturePolicyEqualEthicsStrategyPrisonInvestingIdeologyJailTailsEqual RightsInfancyPathologyFood Stamps
Author:Nicholas D. Kristof
Create image

“Hollywood is still the cradle of many myths, including the one of eternal youth. I find it odd that the very notion of desire, when applied to a woman over 40, is turned into a pathology or a mockery in a number of films. But Hollywood is not the only place to blame, by far. This is just a rendition, possibly magnified by the power of movies, of a general state of things, social, cultural and political.”

StillsStatesFilmPoliticalDesireSocialNumbersYouthEternalHollywoodBlameNotionIncludingMythOddCradleMockeryPathologyEternal Youth
Author:Anne Fontaine
Create image

“Pathology has made us acquainted with a great number of states in which the boundary lines between the ego and the external world become uncertain or in which they are actually drawn incorrectly. There are cases in which parts of a person's own body, even portions of his own mental life - his perceptions, thoughts and feelings -, appear alien to him and as not belonging to his ego; there are other cases in which he ascribes to the external world things that clearly originate in his own ego and that ought to be acknowledged by it.”

WorldPersonsMadeStatesFeelingsBodyLinesNumbersCasesOughtEgoPerceptionBoundariesAliensBelongingPortionsUncertainThoughts And FeelingsPathologyNot Belonging
Book:The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud
Create image

“The creativity and pathology of the human mind are, after all, two sides of the same medal coined in the evolutionary mint. The first is responsible for the splendour of our cathedrals, the second for the gargoyles that decorate them to remind us that the world is full of monsters, devils, and succubi.”

WorldMindFirstsHumansTwoSidesCreativityDevilResponsibleMonstersHuman MindMedalTwo SidesCathedralsMintPathologySplendourGargoyles
Book:Astride the two cultures: Arthur Koestler at 70
Create image

“The main interest of my work is not concerned with the treatment of neuroses but rather with the approach to the numinous. But the fact that the approach to the numinous is the real therapy, and inasmuch as you attain to the numinous experience you are released from the curse of pathology. Even the very disease takes on a numinous character.”

RealCharacterFactsInterestDiseaseApproachConcernedTherapyCurseTreatmentNeurosisPathologyNuminous
Book:Letters
Create image