Robert K. Ressler > Quotes

“There is no such thing as the person who at age thirty-five suddenly changes from being perfectly normal and erupts into totally evil, disruptive, murderous behavior. The behaviors that are precursors to murder have been present and developing in that person's life for a long, long time- since childhood.”
― Robert K. Ressler, Whoever Fights Monsters: My Twenty Years Tracking Serial Killers for the FBI

“Manson is a great talker and his favorite subject is himself.”
― Robert K. Ressler, Whoever Fights Monsters: My Twenty Years Tracking Serial Killers for the FBI

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”
― Robert K. Ressler, Whoever Fights Monsters: My Twenty Years Tracking Serial Killers for the FBI

“Feeding that ego by consistently printing and televising stories about the murders was assuring that there would be more murders.”
― Robert K. Ressler, Whoever Fights Monsters: My Twenty Years Tracking Serial Killers for the FBI

“These children were deprived of something more important than money—love. They ended up paying for that deprivation during the remainder of their lives, and society suffered, too, because their crimes removed many people from the world and their assaultive behavior left alive equally as many victims who remain permanently scarred.”
― Robert K. Ressler, Whoever Fights Monsters: My Twenty Years Tracking Serial Killers for the FBI

“Cognitive mapping and processing are aimed at self-preservation through the reduction of helplessness, terror, and pervasive anxiety. They are introduced and sustained by our first two model components, ineffective social environment and unresolved traumatic formative events, and become established in the patterned responses.”
― Robert K. Ressler, Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives

“Some people still in the BSU have also taken to claiming that they were the models for the FBI characters in the book and movie The Silence of the Lambs, though Harris has stated (and I agree) that the characters are entirely his own and not based on any particular individuals.”
― Robert K. Ressler, Whoever Fights Monsters: My Twenty Years Tracking Serial Killers for the FBI

“As our society grows more mobile, and as the availability of weapons of mass destruction increases, the ability of the antisocial personality to realize his rapacious and murderous fantasies grows apace.”
― Robert K. Ressler, Whoever Fights Monsters: My Twenty Years Tracking Serial Killers for the FBI

“counterpies,”
― Robert K. Ressler, Whoever Fights Monsters: My Twenty Years Tracking Serial Killers for the FBI

“As a society, we seem to be flying too close to the flame, looking for stimulation—we are bored audiences more attuned to fantasy than to reality, in danger of falling completely into the abyss about which Nietzsche warned us.”
― Robert K. Ressler, Whoever Fights Monsters: My Twenty Years Tracking Serial Killers for the FBI

“An important aspect to note here: Where there’s some intervention at this stage, the child who has been rescued may go on to disappoint the family, be truant, not respond overtly to the better environment; but as an adult, he might never offend, at least not to the extent of committing abductions, rapes, and murders.”
― Robert K. Ressler, Whoever Fights Monsters: My Twenty Years Tracking Serial Killers for the FBI

“An important aspect to note here: Where there’s some intervention at this stage, the child who has been rescued may go on to disappoint the family, be truant, not respond overtly to the better environment; but as an adult, he might never offend, at least not to the extent of committing abductions, rapes, and murders. Someone on the track toward antisocial behavior can be retracked only so far; the chances are that he will become a largely dysfunctional adult. For him to be reshaped and return completely to normal behavior is unlikely.”
― Robert K. Ressler, Whoever Fights Monsters: My Twenty Years Tracking Serial Killers for the FBI

“innovation is discouraged in most bureaucracies,”
― Robert K. Ressler, Whoever Fights Monsters: My Twenty Years Tracking Serial Killers for the FBI