Top 60 John E. Douglas Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “There are certain crimes that are simply too cruel, too sadistic, too hideous to be forgiven.”

— John E. Douglas

2. “Lesson learned: Everyone is a potential suspect, and don’t let looks or behavior fool you.”

— John E. Douglas

3. “We think of young, beautiful women as the targets of these men, but vulnerability, more than anything else, is likely to lead to someone’s becoming a victim. That’s why children, senior citizens, prostitutes, drug addicts, the homeless, and other marginalized groups are prime targets of serial killers.”

— John E. Douglas

4. “An investigative interview is a meeting with one or more persons who may have information relative to a crime or the perpetrator of that crime. We try to find out as much of the who, what, when, where, why, and how as possible. That person is not treated as a suspect.”

— John E. Douglas

5. “Modus operandi – MO – is learned behavior. It’s what the perpetrator does to commit the crime. It is dynamic – that is, it can change. Signature, a term I coined to distinguish it from MO, is what the perpetrator has to do to fulfill himself. It is static; it does not change.”

— John E. Douglas

6. “One of the first things every trainee is taught is that an FBI agent only shoots to kill. The thinking that went into this policy is both rigorous and logical: if you draw your weapon, you have already made the decision to shoot. And if you have made the decision that the situation is serious enough to warrant shooting, you have decided it is serious enough to take a life.”

— John E. Douglas

7. “If a man fails at home, he fails in his life.”

— John E. Douglas

8. “As with all of the killers profiled here, nature versus nurture will always be the central tension in this debate about what could produce such monstrous and unnatural acts, but the exploration cannot end there. Inevitably the question eventually comes down to moral agency against inborn determinism. And that leads to a single word: choice.”

— John E. Douglas

9. “If a bank robber tapes over the lens of a surveillance camera, that’s MO. If he feels a need to tear his clothes off and dance naked before that same camera, that’s signature.”

— John E. Douglas

10. “A typical behavioral pattern of overkill is multiple stab wounds in a tight pattern on the neck or chest, and severe damage to the face. It is a murder in which the primary goal is punishment fueled by rage.”

— John E. Douglas

11. “Predators may look and sound and often act like we do, but they don’t think like we do. Their logical process is completely different.”

— John E. Douglas

12. “Behavior reflects personality.”

— John E. Douglas

13. “One of the hallmarks of narcissistic, borderline, and sociopathic personalities is the unwillingness to assume personal responsibility for anything. It is always someone else’s fault.”

— John E. Douglas

14. “The more I questioned these guys, the more I came to understand that the successful criminals were good profilers.”

— John E. Douglas

15. “Don’t make the mistake of confusing a psychopath with a psychotic.”

— John E. Douglas

16. “My colleagues and I on the criminal analysis side of behavior science operate from the premise that anyone who commits a violent or predatory crime is mentally ill. This is almost ipso facto, in that “normal” people do not commit such crimes. But a mental disorder, in and of itself, does not mean the perpetrator is insane, which is a legal, rather than a medical, term that has to do with culpability.”

— John E. Douglas

17. “I am much less interested in giving a convicted sexually motivated killer a second chance than in giving an innocent potential victim a first chance.”

— John E. Douglas

18. “More police and courts and more prisons and better investigative techniques are fine, but the only way crime is going to go down is if all of us simply stop accepting and tolerating it in our families, our friends, and our associates... Crime is a moral problem. It can only be resolved on a moral level.”

— John E. Douglas

19. “Even though their crimes were completely different, the one thing the maladjusted genius Ted Kaczynski and the sadistic but banal underachiever Dennis Rader shared was a monumental sense of ego. Neither one of them could bear to let his brilliance go unrecognized by the public, and that was their downfall in both cases.”

— John E. Douglas

20. “In that treatise Mather wrote his famous formulation: It were better that Ten Suspected Witches should escape, than that one Innocent Person should be Condemned. That sentiment, of course, evolved into the moral underpinning of our modern system of justice. It.”

— John E. Douglas

21. “Whatever my personal feelings, what is important to me in all prison interviews with violent offenders is not to express my own moral outrage, which accomplishes nothing, but to learn as much as I can by establishing a connection with the subject.”

— John E. Douglas

22. “An offender who kills someone close to him is usually motivated by a great sense of perceived betrayal, revenge, or anger, often fueled by jealousy and outrage. We saw this with the O. J. Simpson case, in the murder of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman.”

— John E. Douglas

23. “But what my colleagues and I have found and have tried desperately to get across to others in the business of correction and forensic psychology is that dangerousness is situational. If you can keep someone in a well-ordered environment where he doesn’t have choices to make, he may be fine. But put him back in the environment in which he did badly before, his behavior can quickly change.”

— John E. Douglas

24. “Foul deeds will rise, Though all the earth o’erwhelm them, to men’s eyes. – WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Hamlet.”

— John E. Douglas

25. “But I always start from the same premise, one that I taught throughout my years with the FBI: Past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior.”

— John E. Douglas

26. “Serial killers who claim revenge as a motive are usually manifesting some form of emotional displacement.”

— John E. Douglas

27. “Dennis Rader quoted Harvey Glatman as saying, ‘It was all about the rope.’ What exactly does that mean? The rope symbolized total control. The ultimate fantasy would be to keep these victims alive and dominated indefinitely, although both men knew that wasn’t possible.”

— John E. Douglas

28. “Manipulation. Domination. Control. These are the three watchwords of violent serial offenders.”

— John E. Douglas

29. “Serial murder may, in fact, be a much older phenomenon than we realize. The stories and legends that have filtered down about witches and werewolves and vampires may have been a way of explaining outrages so hideous that no one in the small and close-knit towns of Europe and early America could comprehend the perversities we now take for granted. Monsters had to be supernatural creatures. They couldn’t be just like us.”

— John E. Douglas

30. “As a result, nearly all serial killers believe their crimes are justified, or at least explainable.”

— John E. Douglas

31. “As with everything else in my life, I decided that if we were all going to get through this in one piece, I’d better have a sense of humor.”

— John E. Douglas

32. “We’re all vulnerable. It doesn’t matter how much you know, how experienced you are, how many suspect interrogations you’ve handled successfully. It doesn’t matter if you understand the technique. Each of us can be gotten to – if you can just figure out where and how we’re vulnerable.”

— John E. Douglas

33. “It all comes down to this: Whenever theory supersedes evidence, and prejudice deposes rationalism, there can be no real justice.”

— John E. Douglas

34. “Man is not fully conditioned and determined but rather determines himself whether he gives into conditions or stands up to them. In other words, man is ultimately self-determining.”

— John E. Douglas

35. “You can tell by how an offender manually strangles his victim if he genuinely intends to kill, and if there are any reservations, moral hesitation, or empathy.”

— John E. Douglas

36. “By studying as many crimes as we could, and through talking to the experts – the perpetrators themselves – we have learned to interpret those clues in much the same way a doctor evaluates various symptoms to diagnose a particular disease or condition. And just as a doctor can begin forming a diagnosis after recognizing several aspects of a disease presentation he or she has seen before, we can make various conclusions when we see patterns start to emerge.”

— John E. Douglas

37. “Bundy was probably as close to the archetype of one species of serial killer as you could get: handsome, intelligent, charming, glib, and resourceful. And he brutally killed at least thirty young women from Washington State to Florida during the 1970s.”

— John E. Douglas

38. “Put yourself in the position of the hunter. That’s what I have to do. Think of one of those nature films: a lion on the Serengeti plain in Africa. He sees this huge herd of antelope at a watering hole. But somehow – we can see it in his eyes – the lion locks on a single one out of those thousands of animals. He’s trained himself to sense weakness, vulnerability, something different in one antelope out of the herd that makes it the most likely victim.”

— John E. Douglas

39. “In our research, there is a strong correlation between domineering mothers and men who grow up to be predators. Though the vast majority of those with such mothers do not grow up to be offenders, of those who do, the domineering mother constitutes a significant influencing factor.”

— John E. Douglas

40. “So much of what a law enforcement officer does is difficult to share with anyone, even a spouse. When you spend your days looking at dead and mutilated bodies, particularly when they’re children, it’s not the kind of thing you want to bring home with you. You can’t say over the dinner table, ‘I had a fascinating lust murder today. Let me tell you about it.” That’s why you so often see cops drawn to nurses and vice versa – people who can relate in some way to each other’s work.”

— John E. Douglas

41. “As I told the New Jersey Parole Board in the McGowan case, my cardinal rule is that to understand an artist, you have to view his art. Likewise, with a predator, to understand him, you have to understand his “art,” because that’s what it is to him.”

— John E. Douglas

42. “No matter how careful their planning, for most violent and predatory criminals, since crime is essentially an irrational act in any society that prohibits it, there is often a point in which logic and reason breaks down.”

— John E. Douglas

43. “The interplay between the agent and the violent offender needed to be informal and not overtly structured. What we were looking for was not so much the facts of the case, which were already established, but the motivation, the pre- and post-offense behavior, the victim selection process, and then the big question of why, without being too assertive, directed, or leading – the opposite of what we’d try to do in a suspect interrogation.”

— John E. Douglas

44. “Dr. Viktor Frankl, the Viennese psychiatrist, author, and Holocaust survivor whose book Man’s Search for Meaning is one of the great moral and philosophical documents of our age.”

— John E. Douglas

45. “One of the things that is interesting and pretty consistent among serial predators is that two emotional concepts are constantly warring within them. One is a feeling of grandiosity and entitlement. The other is a deep-seated and pervasive sense of inferiority and inadequacy.”

— John E. Douglas

46. “My one cardinal rule of prison interviews is never to go into the encounter unprepared. I also made a practice of not going in with notes, because that could create an artificial distance or filter between the subject and me when the time came to really bore in and search for the deepest layer of his psyche.”

— John E. Douglas

47. “By the time we had completed our initial round of interviews, we knew what type of person could do such a thing, and three words seemed to characterize the motivations of every one of our offenders: Manipulation. Domination. Control.”

— John E. Douglas

48. “This is probably the most common theme that has emerged in all of my confrontations with killers across the table. There is almost always an external reason the killing started. As a result, nearly all serial killers believe their crimes are justified, or at least explainable. They perceive themselves as the true victims – yet another manifestation of their extreme narcissism. And if a prison psychiatrist happens to hand you the excuse – well, so much the better.”

— John E. Douglas

49. “My role is to get these guys to talk, to find out what is, and was, going on inside their minds. Confrontation and moral indignation do not achieve that. In the end, talking to killers is about playing the long game, with every move a deliberate one – outrage, anger, these emotions are ever present in the background, but they work against you only if they come to the surface.”

— John E. Douglas

50. “I wonder what I would have thought at the time had I known I’d be spending a major part of my Bureau career in another windowless basement room, pursuing far more depressing stories.”

— John E. Douglas